2025-11-26

DMP4NFDI is the basic service in development for data management planning within NFDI, funded and supported by the Base4NFDI initiative. The main objective of DMP4NFDI is to support NFDI consortia in developing and providing standardised and machine-actionable data and software management plan services. Data Management Plans (DMPs) and Software Management Plans (SMPs) are essential components of research data infrastructure, particularly in supporting FAIR, foresightful RDM and facilitating collaboration among all partners involved in research data management (RDM). While researchers often view DMPs primarily as supplements to grant proposals for research funding bodies, their potential extends far beyond this limited perspective.

During the initialisation phase, DMP4NFDI established a multi-tenant RDMO instance with community-specific, customisable clients for several consortia, with some already in productive use (NFDI4ING, NFDI4Chem, NFDI4Culture, FAIRagro) and others in testing environments (NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Earth, MaRDI) to prepare templates and plugins. For template development, we organised several workshops and exchange meetings with consortia and the broader RDM community to collect requirements and feedback, resulting in the publication of the first version of the NFDI DMP Template Framework. The framework ensures interoperability across consortia templates by defining a common vocabulary and supports consortia by providing a reusable and adaptable DMP template available in text form and as an RDMO catalog. We also supported consortia in developing customised RDMO plugins to connect RDMO directly to sensor databases (NFDI4Earth), Zenodo (NFDI4Biodiversity), and knowledge graphs (MaRDI). Completing the framework approach, we gathered requirements for DMP training and developed a train-the-trainer concept.

To prepare for the further integration of consortia during the next project phase and build on experiences from the initial integration use cases, we developed a service cooperation model that describes the responsibilities and collaboration mechanisms between consortia and DMP4NFDI, and which will iteratively be refined in the course of our collaborations.

During the integration phase, we will run regular calls for incubator projects to onboard new consortia. Each Project will typically focus on one aspect of a DMP service: hosting of RDMO, template development for DMPs or SMPs, service integration, or training and outreach activities. We will also incorporate SMPs into the template framework and improve interoperability by aligning it with international standards currently in development.