Overview

EasyDMP’s main design goal is to be easy to use for researchers writing a data management plan, based on a template.

The researcher answers a series of questions by choosing among a limited set of possible answers, and has space for notes for each answer. An HTML file suitable for importing into document processing tools is generated from the answers, as well as a JSON-dump, for export to other types of tools.

Questions have a type, depending on the expected type of answer. For instance, Yes vs. No, a date range, one or more choices of a short set of hand-written predefined choices, one or more choices from an auto-generated large set of choices, one or more urls. Each question also has a position, in order to be able to show them in the correct order. Some question types can lead to branching, for instance if a dataset not sensitive, questions regarding how to safe guard the data can be skipped.

Whenever it makes sense, an answer is translated to a “canned answer”, for instance a “Yes” to “Does this dataset contain sensitive data” can be converted to “This dataset does contain sensitive data.” For other question types, the answer can be put inside a framing text. A question “When will the data be collected?”, which is answered with the date range 2017-2020, can be converted to “The data will be collected between 2017 and 2020”.

Every template has one or more designers. It is the designers’ task to write the canned answers and framing texts so that the text in the generated HTML makes sense. It is the responsibilty of the researchers making plans to assure that any text written in free text fields, like “Notes”, makes sense together with the canned answers.