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Establishing a collection of 841 publicly available Horizon 2020 Data Management Plans

dmps Picture by Gerda Mcneill

Data are increasingly conceptualized as inherently valuable products of scientific research and research funders both on the international and on the national level increasingly require open data and good data management in the projects they fund.
In Horizon 2020, the European Commission ran an initial research data pilot scheme (ORD Pilot) which was extended to the whole programme as of the work programme 2017.

A key component of the ORD pilot is the obligation to create a Data Management Plan (DMP). In recent years, the objective to make data not only open if possible but FAIR, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, has been gaining prominence as an important principle for such DMPs.

DMPs can be an important resource for a variety of purpose, for instance training activities, identifying good (or bad) practices, providing guidance & support to researchers but also for further scientific research into data management and re-use practices. This is why, as part of the "DMP Use Case Project", undertaken on behalf of the RDM Task force group of the OpenAIRE consortium, we decided to establish a curated collection of Horizon 2020 DMPs.

Methodology to establish a list of publicly accessible DMPs

841 Horizon 2020 DMPs are now publicly available on Phaidra, the repository of the University Vienna, at phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:1140797 for further use. 

Initially, we downloaded 1552 publicly available DMPs from CORDIS. These DMPs were then manually and automatically vetted to establish a white list.

Stage 1 – manual vetting: With the help of volunteers from OpenAIRE's RDM taskforce the initial list of DMPs was manually screened according to the following questions:

  • Is the document in question really a DMP? in order to identify and remove documents that had been wrongly classified as a DMP
  • Is the document really public? In order to identify and remove documents that had been wrongly classified as public but in fact were set to restricted access and/or confidential

This initial screening resulted in 1053 DMPs that passed. ERC DMPs are not included since these are not clearly marked as public.

Stage 2 – automatic vetting: In stage two an automatic search for the word "copyright" was conducted in each DMP document. Any DMPs which include copyright were excluded from the collection in order to ensure that only those DMPs which are not IP protected are published.

Results

This process (as described above) has resulted in a list of 841 DMPS which have passed both stages. These DMPs are now publicly available on Phaidra, the repository of the University Vienna, at phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:1140797 for further use (e.g. analysis, training etc).

However, it should be noted that the content of the DMPs have not been quality reviewed – they are published as is and should not necessarily be taken as good practice cases.

Disclaimer

All Data Management Plans available in the collection are clearly marked as public documents (designation PU) and not copyrighted. Furthermore, the CORDIS licence allows re-use(see cordis.europa.eu/about/legal). Nevertheless, users of the collections are advised to consult the individual data management plans for any restrictions in re-use; PHAIDRA and OpenAIRE Austria accept no liability.

Contact & Further information

  • The project was conducted by Daniel Spichtinger, under supervision of Gerda McNeill, with support from the OpenAIRE RDM taskforce and the University of Vienna Library IT Service. For further questions and queries please contact: openaireaustria[at]univie.ac.at

Text by  Daniel Spichtinger

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