Data Management Planning Workshop at ICH

Summary

On Friday 18th November we held a workshop that brought together all interested parties in the JISC Enhancing DMPonline Projects funding stream. The day focused on developing a mutual understanding of the potential challenges and opportunities for extension of the Digital Curation Centre’s DMPOnline tool.

Present

DMP-SS Team: (UCL Institute of Child Health & MRC Unit for Lifelong health & Ageing)

• Tito Castillo – Principal Investigator, MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health
• Stelios Alexandrakis – Project manager and Lead Developer, MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health
• Kevin Garwood – Software Developer
• Michael Waters, Research & Innovations

Digital Curation Centre (DMPOnline)

• Martin Donnelly – Project Manager
• Adrian Richardson – Lead Software Developer

Oxford University (Oxford DMPOnline project)

• David Shotton – Principal Investigator
• Richard Jones – Cottage Labs

Observers

• Arofan Gregory – Metadata Technology & Open Data Foundation
• Veerle Van den Eynden – MRC Data Support Service Project Manager Medical Research Council
• Jonathan Tedds, Senior Research Liaison Manager, University of Leicester
• Simon Hodson, JISC Programm Manager

Issues

After a thought provoking discussion we were left with a few key messages to consider and act upon:

1. Is the existing DCC centralised hosting model for Data Management Plans going to be widely acceptable amongst the wider research community? The existing DCC model involves the management of a centralised repository of data management plans. It was suggested in the meeting that this may prove to be unacceptable to many researchers and we will need to examine the possibilities of federated models being used.
2. Can we express the current DMPOnline data model in a form that is suitable for encorporation into DDI? Arofan Gregory agreed to lead an initiative to develop a more formal modeol of the current DCC checklist that may be used in future to inform the further development of the DDI ‘life-cycle’ standard. Arofan’s clear view was that there are siginificant elements of the existing DDI model that do not explicitly support the DMP concepts although it would be highly desirable to consider their inclusion in a later version of DDI.
3. What is the possible relationship between the IRAS (Integrated Research Application System) and DMP and would there be oportunities to interoperate? The IRAS system is used for submission of a range of approval applications and appears to make use of some form of common interchange standard. The question was askes as to whether thie DMP process could support the IRAS system in some way and how widespread is the use of IRAS at the moment.
4. Is it possible for the DMP-SS project team to story board the proposed interaction between a DMP registry and their proposed Information Security management System? The relationship between the proposed ISMS and DMP registry is still unclear and it is important to begin to describe the proposed information flows and use cases in support of the ongoing development. Stelios Alexandrakis agreed that he would begin this work and Tito castillo agreed to share the current mapping that has been carried out between the DMP checklist and ISO-27001 controls.
5. DDI ‘life-cycle’ training opportunity. Arofan Gregory noted that there is a possibility of DDI training being commissioned by UK Data Archive during 2012 however this has yet to be finalised. There was widespread interest among the group to attend suc a course if and when it takes place.

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Agenda

10.00 Welcome and introductions
10.20 The background to the JISC programme (Simon Hodson)
10.40 DMPOnline history and strategic plan (Martin Donnely)
11.10 Break
11.30 Introduction to the DDI Standard and associated tools (Arofan Gregory)
12:15 Discussion
12:30 Lunch
13:20 DMP-SS Project discussion (led by Tito Castillo)
14:20 Break
14:30 Oxford DMPOnline discussion (led by David Shotton)
15:30 Opportunities for collaboration and enhancement
16:00 Close