WG Discipline-specific Guidance for DMPs

This working group aims to continue work within the international community to fully support improving the effectiveness of DMPs. Research environments increasingly involve international collaborations, thus it is important to represent varying available tools and policy requirements within the discipline-specific guidance. To gain input from different disciplinary experts, we are conducting a survey. The survey will be completed by the time of the RDA 18th Plenary Meeting and the survey results will be shared during the WG session. This survey solicits feedback from experts to understand how a discipline-specific guidance catalogue could impact their daily workflow and be a useful tool in the creation of data management plans. This survey is the first step in our working plan, and will inform the next steps the group takes in the creation of the guidance.

Groups within RDA, including the DMP Common Standard WG and Exposing DMPs WG, have worked to establish standards and best practices for machine-actionable DMPs as well as a reference model and recommendations for sharing data management plans. While these efforts drastically advance the progress of making DMPs an effective research tool for numerous stakeholders, they could be supplemented with more detailed, disciplinary-specific guidance. Thus, to further advance the relevance, effectiveness, and utility of DMPs, discipline-specific guidance is a necessary component. The discipline-specific adaptations allow DMPs to be better integrated into research. The DMP is then adapted to the needs of the researchers and the challenges of the respective discipline. This makes life easier for the researchers. To our knowledge, there have been a few efforts in this direction, in fields of mechanical engineering by RWTH Aachen University in Germany, archeological research by DANS in the Netherlands and education research by the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences in Germany, all these efforts were presented during our BoF session in RDA Plenary 16. 

Initial work in this area was initiated during the Active DMP Interest Group session at the 14th Plenary in Helsinki, Finland. During this session, a lack of discipline specific guidance for data management planning was identified as an area that needed development to support the work of the other working groups (DMP Common Standard WG, Exposing DMPs WG, Engaging Researchers with Research Data IG). Additionally discipline specific guidance will effectively support the work of stakeholders such as DMP service providers, funders, institutions, researchers and RDM professionals. Individuals interested in this topic with expertise in data management planning support for behavioral and social sciences, life sciences, medical sciences, and engineering have since worked together to develop a working group case statement. This case statement was presented at the 16th Plenary held virtually and hosted through Costa Rica, and a case statement was submitted. During this meeting, further refinement of what discipline specific DMP guidance would look like was discussed, including guidance by data type as well as discipline. Then the WG started drafting the survey. During the RDA Plenary 17 and a public meeting, the survey questions were presented to ask for input from the community. Accordingly the survey is finalized and shared internationally in August 2021.