Compilation of Recommendations

Details

Short Title

Rec. 22: Use information held in Data Management Plans

Source Documnent

Turning FAIR into reality: Final report and action plan from the European Commission expert group on FAIR data

Source Document Link

http://dx.doi.org/10.2777/1524

Publishing Organisation

European Commision

Date of Publication

2018-11-26

Topic

Metadata richness/ ingest/ submission, Interlinking/ interoperability, Machine-actionability, Discovery/ indexing/ search, Access/ integration, Capacity building/ incentivisation

Addressed Stakeholders

data service providers, institutions, standards bodies, coordination fora, research community, data stewards

Keywords

Data Management Plan, DMP

Text

DMPs hold valuable information on the data and related outputs, which should be structured in a machine- actionable way to enhance reuse. Investment should be made in DMP standards and tools that adopt common standards and support 'active' DMPs to enable information exchange across the FAIR data ecosystem. Action 22.1: DMPs should be explicitly referenced in systems containing information about research projects and their outputs. Relevant standards and metadata profiles in such systems should consider adaptations to include DMPs as a specific project output entity (rather than inclusion in the general category of research products). This is to allow them to be more easily accessed and used as project outputs, including by machines. The same should apply to all types of FAIR Digital Objects. Action 22.2: A DMP standard should be developed that is extensible (e.g. Dublin Core) by discipline (e.g. Darwin Core) or by the characteristics of the data (e.g. scale, sensitivity), or the data type (specific characteristics and requirements of the encoding). Action 22.3: Work is necessary to make DMPs machine-readable and actionable. This includes the development of concepts and tools to support the creation of useful and usable data management plans tied to actual research workflows. Action 22.4: DMPs themselves should conform to FAIR principles and be Open where possible. Action 22.5: Information gathered from the process of implementing and evaluating DMPs relating to conformity, challenges and good practices should be used to improve practice.