Data Management Planning#

Planning research involves the compilation of a data management plan (DMP). A DMP can be used as a valuable project planning instrument and is also often times required by project funders, e.g. the European Commission. At DKRZ, the following points have to be defined as accurate as possible for each DKRZ HPC project in order to realize a seamless workflow and efficient use of DKRZ resource.:

  • volumes

  • structures

  • access patterns

  • storage locations

Note

A data management plan (DMP) is defined as a (living) document which contains essential information on all the data created or used in a scientific project. A DMP should usually be conceived at the beginning of a project and then be continuously updated.

DKRZ maintains a local instance of the community-developed tool RDMO (Research Data Management Organiser) allowing users to conceive and maintain a DMP specifically tailored to Earth System Science and the environment at DKRZ. Users can login with their DKRZ account and password.

RDMO (Research Data Management Organiser)#

rdmo github rdmo instance

RDMO (Research Data Management Organiser) is an interactive web-based tool to create and continuously adapt the data management plan (DMP) as a living document during the scientific research timeframe. As a support tool useful both for the scientists as well as the funding agencies, the DMPs provide many advantages within a research project,

  • Support during the entire life cycle of the project (proposal, active research time and after the project lifetime)

  • Tracks all the data relevant information by simplification of data related reporting

  • Defines accountability of the project members/organizations involved (valuable information in case of changes with staff members)

  • Incorporates the definition of legal and ethical aspects of the data

  • Highlights issues such as reproducibility, storage and subsequent (re-)use of the data

  • Provides control to influence the tasks/process(es) at an early stage of the project thereby saving time at the end

  • Customizable with respect to the project’s, funder’s, or institutional conditions/guidelines/requirements. For additional information, contact us!

RDMO was developed as part of a DFG project and tested with the help of different groups of users. Currently, RDMO is maintained and documented via github and relies on a large and active community of users to remain up-to-date with current RDM developments. DKRZ offers an instance of the web-based software Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO) to facilitate the creation of data management plans for its users.

If you have any questions about data management plans, on the use of our RDMO installation or anything related to research data management, please feel free to contact the Data Management department team at DKRZ.

Why Use RDMO for your project?#

Apart from being open source, multilingual and providing an organized overview of data related activities, RDMO covers all adaptable scientific project management requirements. Many third-party funders (e.g., DFG, Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe among others) expect a DMP as part of the grant application for funding. Depending on the project requirements, RDMO provides various DMP templates as views, along with the possibility of import/export functionality of downloading the final DMP document.

Tutorial (Step by step guide for getting started with RDMO) Set of PDF slides - tutorial

On this page