OSTrails contributed to the 30th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2026) in Faro, Portugal, with the paper "Community Metrics and Automated Assessment of Machine-Actionable Data Management Plans". The paper was authored by Elli Papadopoulou, Tomasz Miksa, Andres Tabima and Maria Kontopidi. Tomasz Miksa presented the paper to the conference audience in a session on FAIR assessment.
The presentation focused on the Data Management Plan (DMP) Evaluation Service, one of the core components of the OSTrails architecture alongside Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), DMP platforms, and FAIR assessment tools. Rather than focusing on technical details, the presentation explained how the project gathered requirements from its pilots and translated them into community-driven resources available online.This work contributes to the deliverable on the DMP Evaluation Service and addresses one of the topics being explored by the project’s pilots.
The paper addresses the challenge that funders’ criteria for evaluating DMPs are often too general to address the specific needs of individual research communities. Research communities seeking to establish more specific evaluation criteria need additional resources and guidance. The paper presents the DMP Evaluation Metrics Catalogue, which brings together 94 community-driven metrics and describes how machine-actionable DMPs can be assessed automatically using reproducible, machine-readable tests.
The paper was nominated for the Best Paper Award and received positive reviews. The paper’s presentation in a session on FAIR assessment highlighted the relevance of automated DMP evaluation and the broader assessment of data management practices.
How OSTrails Findings Inform Related Research
Enhancing Machine-Actionable DMPs with Policy Entities Expressed in ODRL’, which was presented by OpenAIRE partners involved in the RAISE Suite project.The paper maps the RDA DMP Common Standard to ODRL constructs, enabling policy information to be formally represented in machine-actionable DMPs.The work was motivated by empirical evidence from OSTrails, which indicated that policy compliance is among the most frequently requested aspects of maDMP evaluation, while remaining difficult to automate. This provides an example of how requirements gathered through the OSTrails pilots can inform further research into making DMPs more actionable. Read more about the RAISE Suite contribution in the related news article.
NEXT STEPS
Next, the project will review the catalogue, define benchmarks tailored to specific research communities and pilot use cases, and develop additional tests.
"We're very happy to have been nominated for the best paper award. This reflects the good reviews we received. Our paper was presented in a session that in general focused on FAIR assessment, and this shows the relevance of our work, as there is still need for automated evaluation of DMPs and in general data management practices. The weather in Faro was great, which made this conference very enjoyable." - Tomasz Miksa
