The DMPTool was developed in direct response to the demands from funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, that researchers create plans for managing any research data. The original contributing institutions were: University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library, DataONE, Digital Curation Centre (DCC-UK), Smithsonian Institution, University of California, Los Angeles Library, University of California, San Diego Libraries, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library, and University of Virginia Library. The founding partners obtained funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create a second version of the tool, which was released in 2014.
