DMPTool

The DMPTool is a free, open-source, online system for creating and managing data management plans (DMPs). DMPs are now required by many funding agencies as part of the grant proposal submission process.

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Infrastructure

The system consists of 2 major components:

• The DMPTool, a DMP authoring tool that is focused on helping researchers write DMPs
• The DMPHub that registers DMP Ids and versions DMP metadata regardless of where the DMP was created

From the user perspective, both of these components appear to be a single unified application. An application load balancer should be used to direct traffic to the appropriate backend component. For example

• /plans/123 should be directed to the DMPTool Rails based authoring tool so that the user can edit their DMP.
• /dmps/doi.org/10.12345/A1FF03a should be directed to the DMPHub's landing page for that DMP ID

The DMPTool Rails application communicates with the DMPHub via the API.

• when the user wants to finalize their DMP and create a DMP ID
• when the user updates data about a DMP that has a registered DMP ID

The DMPHub communicates with the DMPTool via the API.

• when an external system updates DMP ID metadata for a DMP that was created in the DMPTool (e.g. a funder system provides grant information, or a repository provides the DOI of a deposited dataset)

Please note that the DMPTool can be run without the DMPHub or when using a separate service (e.g. DataCite) to generate DOIs for your DMPs. Please see the 'The DMPHub' section below for instructions on how to make the necessary changes.

The DMPTool

The DMPTool is a Rails application (backed by a MySQL or Postgres database) that provides researchers with a click-through wizard for creating a DMP that complies with funder requirements. The wizard has direct links to funder websites, help text for answering questions, and resources for best practices surrounding data management. It is derived from the DMPRoadmap open source project. DMPRoadmap is being collaboratively developed by members of the University of California Curation Center (UC3), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and the Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique and contributions from the community.

Pre-requisites

Roadmap is a Ruby on Rails application and you will need to have:

• Ruby = 3.0
• Rails = 6.1
• Node >= 18.11
• MySQL >= 8.0 OR PostgreSQL

Variations from DMPRoadmap

The DMPTool Rails application has been modified from the baseline DMPRoadmap codebase in the following ways:

• Homepage: A complete redesign of the homepage
• Sigin in/Create account: The sign in and create account workflows has been overhauled to place more emphasis on logging in via institutional credentials (Shibboleth). All of the DMPTool code for these items have been separated into its own app/views/branded/shared/ subdirectory. The corresponding JS file can be found at app/javascript/dmptool/.
• Public participating institutions page: A new Participating Institutions page has been added and is accessible to the public.
• Public plans: The DMPTool provides advanced filtering and search for the public plans page. It also allows institutional administrators to 'feature' exemplar plans that their users have made.
• Related Works: Admins are able to enter the identifiers for related project outputs (e.g. journal articles, dataset DOIs, etc.) to a DMP's project details page.
• DMP ID Registration: The system allows users to register DMP IDs for their plans.
• OAuth2 compliant API: The API v2 is OAuth2 compliant and allows partner systems to fetch and download a user's DMPs after the user authorizes the interaction.
• Navigation: A complete redesign of the header and footer navigation. All of the custom menus have been placed in app/views/branded/layouts/.
• Styling: We have added app/assets/stylesheets/dmptool/**/*.scss files that gets loaded after the base DMPRoadmap stylesheets
• Text/Labels: Various text and labels have been updated.
• Static Content: Added a gem to allow the app/views/branded/static_pages to be managed via Markdown instead of HTML. Changed the content of existing pages and added new pages

Translations

See the Translations Guide

Installation

See the Installation Guide

Troubleshooting

See the Troubleshooting Guide on the DMPRoadmap Wiki

The DMPHub

The DMPHub is an API (backed by a NoSQL document database) that provides DMP ID registration (unique identifiers for DMPs), metadata versioning, publicly accessible and highly available landing pages for DMP ID metadata, and a mechanism for uploading the PDF for a DMP generated outside the DMPTool.

Please see the following repositories:

• dmp-hub-cfn - AWS Cloud Formation templates to build the necessary infrastructure for the DMPHub
• dmp-hub-sam - AWS Lambda code that contains all of the application logic

How versioning works

The DMPHub versions a DMP's metadata (and PDF if applicable) when changes are made.

When changes from the external system (DMPTool in most cases) come through, the DMPHub checks the DMP ID item's modified date against the internal stored dmphub_modification_day. If the dates differ or the modifier is not the system of provenance (the one who created the DMP record) then a new version is created.

When a new version is created the following happens:

• a 'snapshot' is taken of the curent DMP metadata.
• a new dmproadmap_related_identifier is added to the 'snapshot' that contains a pointer to the 'latest' version.
• the updated DMP metadata is then merged with any modifications from external systems (e.g. grant ids added by funder systems)
• a new dmproadmap_related_identifier is added to the DMP metadata that is a pointer to the 'snapshot'

Any subsequent requests for the DMP ID display the updated metadata. The prior version is then accessible via an 'All versions' menu item on the landing page, or directly via the dmproadmap_related_identifier value

Disabling or replacing the DMPHub

You can run the DMPTool Rails application without the DMPHub component discussed here. To do that you can do one of the following:

• opting not to allow users to generate DMP IDs at all
  • To do this, simply set both the enable_dmp_id_registration, enable_orcid_publication, and dmphub_active values to false in the config/dmproadmap.yml file.
• by using DataCite directly to generate DMP IDs
  • To do this you must have a registered account with DataCite
  • Set your DataCite shoulder and credentials in the credentials.yaml.enc file
  • Set the dmphub_active variable to false and the datacite_active variable to true in the config/dmproadmap.yml.
• by using another service to generate DMP IDs
  • Create a new DMP ID service by copying the app/services/external_apis/datacite_service.rb and config/initializers/external_apis/datacite.rb files and renaming them to something like my_service.rb
  • Add any necessary configuration options to config/configs/dmproadmap_config.rb and config/dmproadmap.yml
  • Update the app/services/dmp_id_service.rb file to add your new service to the minter function
  • If others might find your new service useful, consider contributing it back to this repository as a pull request

Support

Issues should be reported on Github Issues Please be advised though that we can only provide support for the DMPTool. This code is offered as open source and we can only provide limited support for your local installation.

Issues will be triaged by our team and if applicable will be moved/opened in the DMPRoadmap repository.

Contributing

See the Contributing Guide.

License

The DMPTool project uses the MIT License.