CARL’s Portage announces the launch of DMP Assistant

OTTAWA, October 21, 2015 – As part of its Portage initiative, CARL is pleased to announce the launch of DMP Assistant. This national, open, bilingual data management planning tool will assist researchers throughout their projects.

Data management plans (DMPs) are widely recognized in the international research community as a best practice. DMP Assistant (Assistant PGD in French) takes users step-by-step through a series of questions based on a general template for research data stewardship. It is freely available to all researchers in Canada and provides specialized guidance to help researchers utilize the tool to develop their plan. It also offers the option of fulfilling DMP requirements of specific funders or using templates from other organizations.

DMP Assistant was adapted from the (UK) Digital Curation Centre’s DMPOnline tool and is hosted at the University of Alberta. The French user interface was produced with support from the Université de Montréal Library. A Portage DMP Experts Group, composed of data librarians from a number of Canadian universities, developed the general data stewardship template and conducted usability tests with researchers and other stakeholders. “This was a truly collaborative effort that drew on the expanding data management expertise in libraries and their universities across Canada,” said Jeff Moon, chair of the Portage DMP Experts Group.

DMP Assistant will receive ongoing support from the Portage network to ensure that it remains up-to-date and relevant. “We are delighted to announce the launch of this valuable tool to support data stewardship in Canada,” stated Chuck Humphrey, Director of Portage. “This is Portage’s first step in building a set of sustainable, practical national services for research data management.”

DMP Assistant is available at: https://portagenetwork.ca or https://reseauportage.ca.

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For more information, please contact Chuck Humphrey, Portage Director, Canadian Association of Research Libraries () or Susan Haigh, Executive Director, Canadian Association of Research Libraries ().

Portage is a national research data management initiative to assist researchers and other research data management stakeholders through a library-based network of expertise on RDM and national platforms for planning, preserving, and discovering research data. Portage is managed by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and was launched in May 2015.