DMPRoadmap (DMP Tool)

DMPRoadmap is an open-source Ruby on Rails platform for creating, reviewing, and exporting DMPs, jointly developed by the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of California Curation Center. It is not itself a single branded product — the same codebase is deployed under different institutional and national brands, most notably DMPonline (widely used across UK and European institutions) and DMPTool (widely used across US institutions, at dmptool.org). It supports funder- and institution-specific templates, role-based collaboration on a single plan, comment-style review, and export to PDF/DOCX as well as RDA DMP Common Standard JSON.

A research office most commonly meets DMPRoadmap as whichever branded instance its institution runs — DMPonline in the UK, DMPTool in the US — pre-loaded with the funder templates its researchers are most likely to need. Recent releases add a persistent “DMP ID” concept, enabling versions of a plan to be identified and tracked across services in support of the living DMP idea.

How it differs from other DMP tools

• vs. Argos (OpenAIRE) — a separate codebase and operator; Argos is built specifically around European Open Science Cloud and OpenAIRE Research Graph integration, whereas DMPRoadmap’s institutional deployments are broader and funder-agnostic.
• vs. ezDMP / DataDMP — both are narrower in scope (one funder’s template, or one country’s institutional-infrastructure integration) than DMPRoadmap’s general multi-funder, multi-institution model.

References

• DMPRoadmap project documentation; UC Curation Center and Digital Curation Centre partnership materials.

Checking this against the current guidance

Whether a plan started in DMPTool exports cleanly into DMPonline, despite sharing the DMPRoadmap codebase, depends on each institution’s own template customizations. The answer depends on which institutional customization you are working to,
and the page above states the general rule.

Ask
CASRAI: Since DMPTool and DMPonline are both built on the DMPRoadmap codebase, does a plan started in one export cleanly into the other, or do institution-specific customizations break that portability?

It searches CASRAI’s indexed corpus of research-administration guidance and cites
the passage behind each claim, so you can open the source and check it rather than
take its word — and it says so when the corpus does not cover something instead of
guessing. Two questions a day are free while you are signed out, no
account and no card. Everything CASRAI publishes stays free to read.

Frequently asked questions

Is DMPRoadmap itself a tool researchers use directly?

No — DMPRoadmap is the open-source codebase; researchers use the hosted products built on it, DMPTool (US-focused) or DMPonline (UK/EU-focused), not DMPRoadmap directly.

Can an institution run its own instance of DMPRoadmap instead of using DMPTool or DMPonline?

Yes — because it’s open source, an institution or consortium can self-host a DMPRoadmap instance with its own branding and templates rather than using either hosted service.

Does a plan exported from DMPRoadmap work in RDMO or DSW?

Not directly — RDMO and DSW use their own data models and question catalogs rather than the DMPRoadmap schema, so moving a plan between them typically means re-entering content rather than a clean import.