Dash: Improving Community Repositories for Better Data Sharing [eScholarship]

"Why aren’t researchers using institutional repositories? First, the repositories are often not set up for self-service operation by individual researchers who wish to deposit a single dataset without assistance. Second, many (or perhaps most) institutional repositories were created with publications in mind [8], rather than datasets, which may in part account for their less-than-ideal functionality. Third, user interfaces for the repositories are often poorly designed and do not take into account the user’s experience (or inexperience) and expectations. Because more of our activities are conducted on the Internet, we are exposed to many high-quality, commercial-grade user interfaces in the course of a workday. Correspondingly, researchers have expectations for clean, simple interfaces that can be learned quickly, with minimal need for contacting repository administrators. 

 ​We propose to address the three issues above with Dash, a well-designed, userfriendly data curation platform that can be layered on top of existing community repositories. Rather than creating a new repository or rebuilding community repositories from the ground up, Dash will provide a way for organizations to allow self-service deposit of datasets via a simple, intuitive interface that is designed with individual researchers in mind. Researchers will be able to document, preserve, and publicly share their own data with minimal support required from repository staff, as well as be able to find, retrieve, and reuse data made available by others...."