Bringing data into the open repository fold | Digital Curation Centre

“Research data and how repositories can better cope with it was a hot topic at OR2012 in Edinburgh last week... We also had a large room packed to the gunnels for the DCC-ICPSR workshop on ‘Institutional Repositories and Data, Roles and Responsibilities’... The slides are all available on the event page. This workshop was facilitated by Kevin Ashley and organised by DCC’s Monica Duke, Graham Pryor and myself. Our co-organisers were Jared Lyle from ICPSR, fellow traveller Ann Green, plus Gregg Gordon of US repository SSRN Social Science Research Network alongside three UK universities involved in the JISC Managing Research Data programme. First up, Graham Pryor reflected on the DCC’s programme of ‘Institutional engagements’, which is helping UK universities face hard questions about justifying investing in institution-wide research data repository capabilities. How far should these go in supporting their researchers’ curation needs and the data resulting from their activities? Should they be a ‘lender of last resort’, a home for orphaned data to fill gaps left by national and internal disciplinary repositories?  Can an institutional repository be expected to deal with all aspects of managing all research data, or focus on showcasing catalogues of metadata about the assets they are responsible for, and outsource curation and preservation to the emerging range of commercial players? ... Jared Lyle and Ann Green took us through early findings from their survey of institutional repositories in March/April this year. Responses, which were mainly from the US, identified challenges and  services repositories wanted to help address them. Format migration, data recovery, media recovery and cost estimation topped the list... Cathy Pink’s talk on the Research 360 project at University of Bath gave a really useful summary of the use case for even relatively small institutions to invest in institution-wide data management capabilities. First is the growing demand for access to publicly funded research data, reflected in, for example, the UK government’s ‘Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth’. The policies of funding bodies such as EPSRC are another major driver of course, with the university expected to bridge the gaps faced by researchers with no natural home for their data... Thinking a little further ahead, another driver is the institution’s ability to respond to research assessments by linking valuable datasets to other research outputs, ensuring all are citable, have external visibility, and contribute to research impact. Sally Rumsey picked up on the discoverability theme in her talk, asking what is ‘just enough’ metadata. That depends, for example on, whether we are talking about citing a dataset, discovery, compliance with funder requirements, assessing (re)usefulness, preservation, reporting and business intelligence. The context for the question is Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which is rolling out Datafinder, a catalogue of research data extracted from various sources including Oxford's Databank repository... Gregg Gordon of SSRN gave the final short talk and a different perspective. Social Science Research Network is a for-profit organisation operating one of the largest pre-print archives on a ‘freemium’ business model, and considering how data fits into that. Depositors can currently deposit almost any form of article, which is freely accessible on an as-is basis. SSRN does not seek or clear licensing rights, or offer any preservation capability. Depositors have had versioning capability available for several years, and while the daily rate of submissions has reached 60k, the rate of revisions has surpassed that. SSRN’s premium offering comprises ‘networks’ of editor-selected content on various subject themes, together with freely available metrics-based navigation. How SSRN might accommodate data remains to be seen, but Gordon is aiming to identify ‘prestigious’ content through usage-based metrics and an expanded role for repositories in peer review...”