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On April 8, 2025, research support staff gathered in the city centre library of Utrecht University for the fourth UDCC Forum. Since initiating these meetings in November of 2024, both the immediate and global implications of our work has proven dynamic and challenging to predict.

Digital competencies, research data, and the role of the university in society grow increasingly relevant to public conversations and worldviews. What is clear in all this is that by opening our own pathways of communication, by working together as people within the university, we increase both our own literacy of these surroundings and ability to utilise our expertise and voice in supporting our colleauges. Each UDCC Forum is permeated by a feeling of collective care. 

Knowledge Exchange 

In the first half of the UDCC Forum, the people supporting digital competencies across the university worked through the Open Agenda to share their latest efforts and build mutual support. We shared information the new , recently announced national , and local efforts to build more efficient processes into our research data management infrastructure. 

We collectively discussed structural shifts that are commencing within Utrecht University, as mundane but impactful changes to working processes are enacted, such as a review of the institution’s research data storage practices. At the national level, we wonder how shifts such as government austerity measures against the universities will bend our work now that they are signed into law. All the while, global events test the resilience of scholarly infrastructure. We find that when we exchange knowledge within these Forums, the forthcoming changes feel less daunting and our own agency surfaces again. 

Rethinking the Data Management Plan at �����̨ 

During the special session, the UDCC Forum initiated an reflective discussion on the Data Management Plan (DMP) at Utrecht University (�����̨). The two primary goals of this session were to 1) Make an inventory of what the �����̨ support community considered as the most important purpose of a DMP, and to 2) identify what the currently experienced issues were with the DMP in its current form, and what could be done about those. About 20 members of the UDCC community joined, with representatives from Geosciences, Science, Law, Economics and Governance, Humanities, Veterinary Medicine, the University Library and ITS. 

Identified Purposes of a DMP 

In the first part of the session, participants listed six potential purposes of a DMP. For example, is the DMP meant to stimulate research replication and scholarly transparency? Or is it just a funding requirement, or a control mechanism so that researchers come across support staff? After completing this list, Forum participants were asked to give a top 3 of the purposes of a DMP they found most important. We used these votes to calculate a weighted average. Here is the top 3: 

• Research feasibility, planning, awareness: The most voted purpose of a DMP seems to be as a practical tool to plan research and to raise awareness of the importance of data management in the research lifecycle. 

• Replication/scholarly transparency: the second most important voted purpose of a DMP was that of enabling replication of research results and transparency on how those results came to be. 

• Reuse/open science: in shared second place came the DMP as a tool to increase the reuse of research data for new research, in line with the open science principles. 

Interestingly, the purpose of fulfilling ethics and GDPR requirements came last in the vote. Despite the fact that, in our experience, researchers sometimes only fill out a DMP because mandated by their ethics committee, the support staff present apparently did not see that as the main purpose of a DMP. 

In conclusion, the Forum participants see a DMP primarily as an instrument to activate the researcher to think about the data-related aspects of his research in general so that they can take informed choices. In what field these choices are to be sought, think e.g. research-design, feasibility, replication, retention periods etc., that is up to the researcher to decide. 

Identified Issues with DMPs 

In the second part of the session, we asked participants to think in groups about 1) pain points in the current way the DMP is used – either in terms of content or in terms of the process, 2) for whom these are pain points and 3) what can be done about it.  Content-related pain points and suggested solutions are: 

• There are many different DMP templates with each their own focus. In some templates, the questions asked are very concrete and planning-focused, while others ask vaguer questions and focus on (FAIR) data as research output only. Moreover, not all templates are useful for others to use, such as for ethics committees and there is a lot of redundancy between forms (e.g. between DMP, ethics committee and privacy scan). For example, a DMP can in principle be filled out about a whole four-year PhD project, while an ethics committee would require in more detail what an individual study in that project is doing with the data. A suggested potential solution could be a “DMP converter”, which can convert the DMP into other usable formats. 

• Filling out a DMP is unnecessarily time-inefficient. Sometimes the DMP can have irrelevant questions, such as when you don’t process personal data, or are seemingly repetitive. Suggested solutions are to reduce the amount of questions, make questions multiple choice where possible, and to make the DMP more actionable. One option is to add a data table overview like in the DMP template of the , and to remove existing questions that already ask about these. To make the DMP more actionable, it could be that certain questions only appear when something is selected (e.g., the questions about privacy appear only when personal data is processed), and that when someone selects that they use a certain tool, they are immediately referred to existing support about that tool. 

• Guidance in DMPonline is unclear and encourages copy-pasting. This should be updated in the �����̨ template, but funders should also be asked to update their guidance (in case researchers use a funder template). 

Process-related pain points all revolved around more cultural aspects of the DMP: The DMP is a requirement out of principle, but currently often seen as irrelevant in practice. This is a problem for researchers (why would they bother to create a DMP? Is there a return on investment?) as well as for support staff as their target audience is not really bothered. Rule-setting parties (central university, faculties, funders) set requirements for data management and who is responsible for it, but there is a lack of enforcement of such policies. As a ‘stick’, funders might threaten to withhold funding if there is no DMP. However, internally, there are no direct consequences to non-compliance, nor is there any follow-up process to check whether data management plan and reality meet at a point in time. Forum participants identified that there is not a lot of ‘carrot’ in this story, i.e. motivation for researchers to create a DMP. It is therefore important to think of incentives to create DMPs, educate researchers why a DMP is useful, or organize a mandatory course. External funders could also provide ‘carrots’ if needed. 

Moving Forward 

What can we learn from this session? It seems that UDCC community members prefer framing the DMP in terms of their practical use for researchers. This may be because making the DMP mandatory has not necessarily aided in the uptake of DMPs and in improving the quality of research (see also the ). Moreover, it has been noticed that the DMP is seen as an administrative hurdle and there is little internal motivation to create one.  

To start tackling the issues identified, we propose the following ways forward: 

• UDCC members should collaborate to create a new �����̨ DMP template that is much more practical, short, and actionable. This template should be published as a document and embedded into DMPonline. 

• Selected UDCC members, such as the University Library (the functional managers of DMPonline), should contact Dutch funders (NWO, ZonMW) to get the new template approved, and to discuss how they see the DMP now and in the future. 

• A new �����̨ RDM policy framework should tackle when a DMP is and when it isn’t mandatory. It should also clearly consider how the policy framework should be enforced and if and how DMPs should still be seen as a living document that needs to be kept up-to-date throughout a research project.