New support tools: zoom on the corpus of disciplinary data management plans proposed by a working group of RDA France
How can scientists be brought to the process of drawing up data management plans (DMP)? How can they be helped to seize this tool by perceiving it as something other than an administrative constraint? These questions, which are still largely topical for research support staff, were raised by members of the French chapter of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) as early as 2022. A first workshop on the subject was held at the time to gather numerous ideas, testimonies and feedback.
Among all these avenues, the importance of being able to provide or rely on DMPs already completed and sufficiently detailed to be able to be proposed, not in models to be copied, but as examples, in a way adapted to the disciplinary field concerned.
It is to this task that, since March 2023, a dedicated working group has been set up by RDA France. Consisting of experts recruited on a voluntary basis, most of its members hold positions in support of scientific teams for the sharing of their data. Their research resulted in a corpus composed of 65 DMPs and 3 DMP models, all public and selected after examination by the members of the group.
The corpus is to be consulted in the form of a dataset deposited in the generic space of the Recherche Data Gouv repository.
As highlighted in the article that explains the methodology of this work, ‘the field of data management plans evolves rapidly, as the communities develop their ownership. The corpus constituted by the working group will have to be maintained and enriched to remain relevant over time and improve disciplinary coverage’.
This corpus, which meets a real need, promises to be a very useful toolbox in which data management clusters and other support cells can draw on targeted requests, or as part of training and awareness-raising activities for research teams.