This month, FindingPheno is pleased to announce that we have now reached a key early milestone in our project, the completion of our Data Management Plan (DMP). This plan was developed following the Horizon 2020 template and submitted to the EU as a project deliverable; however, it is treated as a working document within the project and will be updated at least annually to reflect the data management approach taken within the project.
The major aim of this DMP is to ensure that our data sets follow the FAIR principles, i.e. they are all Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. To this end, the first draft establishes FindingPheno’s formalised processes for research data creation, curation, documentation, storage, and access. In particular, we discuss ongoing management of the already-existing data sets that we are using to develop our computational tools as they form the bulk of data within the project. We are lucky in that these data sets already follow the FAIR principles, so the DMP instead focusses on how best to compile, track, attribute, and re-share this data during and after our analysis. The DMP also covers other data management issues such as IPR, ethics, privacy, and GDPR. In future versions of the DMP we expect to elaborate more on how best to openly share the algorithms, tools and workflows developed during the project in line with the intent of the original FAIR publication.
Developing and maintaining this DMP is a requirement for FindingPheno as part of our participation in H2020 Open Research Data Pilot (ORD pilot). The ORD pilot focuses on maximising access to and re-use of research data generated in H2020 projects by asking for this data to be deposited in an open access repository wherever possible, along with any relevant metadata or other documentation needed for someone else to then find and use this data in a meaningful way. Opting in to this pilot was an obvious choice for FindingPheno as we rely on, and benefit from, reusing data from other projects and researchers - so of course we want data to be open! At the same time, we are keeping the actual detailed DMP confidential at this stage to allow honest and full discussion of our data use between partners while protecting the commercially sensitive aspects of the project. We expect to release a final version of the plan once all innovation and IPR activities are complete and the project ended, thus fulfilling the EU principles of “as open as possible and as closed as necessary”.
Overall we have worked to ensure the FindingPheno DMP is more than just a template or dry deliverable, but is a detailed document that provides true guidance for the project partners on how to uphold our principles of open sharing and free access in actual research practise.
Written by Shelley Edmunds