ds-wizard.org

What It Is

Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) is an open-source platform for research data management plans (DMPs). Its core goal is to turn complex data governance, FAIR principles, and funder DMP requirements into collaborative, maintainable, and machine-actionable workflows. Its user cases span ELIXIR nodes, universities, research infrastructures, and bioinformatics organizations.

Core Features and Collaboration

DSW is built around the workflow of “knowledge models + smart questionnaires + export templates.” Researchers do not need to start a DMP from a blank document; instead, they answer questions with conditional branching and receive guidance, external resources, FAIR metric recommendations, and community help. Projects can progress through stages such as before proposal submission, before DMP submission, and before project completion. Its collaboration features are fairly complete: real-time online editing, sharing with users who have or do not have accounts, view/edit/owner permissions, comments, editor notes, change history, version tagging, and restoring previous states.

Integrations, Deployment, and Developer Capabilities

The collected text indicates that DSW can connect to FAIRsharing, supports OpenID Connect single sign-on, and can submit documents such as PDF and RDF files to external review services, triple stores, or nanopublication services through its submission service. The platform provides a REST API and embeds Swagger documentation in each instance, making it easier to script FAIR metric retrieval or integrate with project management, document management, databases, controlled vocabularies, and repository systems. IFB runs its own DSW instance, and combined with DSW’s open-source nature, this suggests it is suitable for institutional self-hosting. There is no clear description of an official cloud-hosted offering.

Pricing and Limitations

The available text does not disclose commercial plans, hosted pricing, SLA details, or enterprise support; it only notes that sponsorship is available through GitHub Sponsors. On the security side, only sharing permissions and OIDC are mentioned; there is no visible information about encryption, backups, ISO/GDPR certifications, or similar assurances. Its strengths are highly focused on research DMPs, FAIR, and maDMP. If an organization only needs general document approval or a knowledge base, DSW may feel too specialized and may involve relatively high deployment and integration costs.

Who It’s For and Access from China

DSW is suitable for universities, research institutes, grant project offices, data stewards, and enterprise R&D and compliance teams that need to build institution-level data management plans, reporting templates, and machine-readable data governance workflows. The text does not specify access from mainland China, payment methods, or Chinese localization status. Before going live, it is advisable to test network connectivity and evaluate alternatives such as DMPonline, DMPTool, Argos, DataWiz, easyDMP, or domestic collaborative document and research data management solutions.