CDL and Partners Receive Sloan Funding to Enhance DMPTool Features; Reach Out to Community

By Carly Strasser, Data Curation Specialist

The California Digital Library and its partners were awarded a $590,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund further development of the popular Data Management Planning Tool (DMPTool) in 2013.  The bulk of the grant will go to the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the CDL to fund improvements to the DMPTool including expanded functionality, training modules, documentation and the creation of an open-source community to sustain the DMPTool in the future.  Project partners are the University of Virginia Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, and DataONE.

Datasets are the currency of scientific and intellectual advancement. Despite this reality, most researchers are not aware of how best to manage their data. The DMPTool, launched in October 2011, is a freely available web application that addresses this need by guiding users through the process of creating a data management plan for a range of funders.

The current version of the DMPTool provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create data management plans for specific funding agencies,
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data, and
• Provides information about resources and services available to researchers to help fulfill the data management requirements.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funding will support a second version, DMPTool2, that will:

Promote the practice of data management, sharing, and preservation, emphasizing the utility of best practices beyond meeting funder requirements.

• Enable institutions to easily shape and exploit the DMPTool to meet local need.
• Foster the emergence of an engaged open source community of DMPTool users and developers.
• Maintain transparency in all project activities to facilitate community involvement.
• Increase the depth and breadth of the tool’s coverage for funder and institutional data management requirements.
• Enable collaboration and connect stakeholders to each other and institutional resources, including services, expertise and guidance.
• Provide support for the full data management life cycle, including provision for collaborative plan authorship, and review and reporting by institutional administrators.

For questions, contact DMPTool Service Manager Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu.
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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant-making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance.

About the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library

UC3 is a creative partnership bringing together the expertise and resources of the University of California. Together with the UC Libraries we provide high quality and cost-effective solutions that enable campus constituencies – museums, libraries, archives, academic departments, research units, and individual researchers – to have direct control over the management, curation, and preservation of the information resources underpinning their scholarly activities. For more information, visit www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/.