KUBIS Dataverse Network: A repository for primary data at the Royal Library/Copenhagen University and Information Service

Please use the link above to access a pdf of the article published in the open access journal ‘sciecominfo - Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.’ The mission of the journal is “to [1] To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives [2] To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. [3] To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.” The journal “is an Open Access web journal covering current developments in scientific communication in the Nordic/Baltic countries and all aspects of scientific and scholarly communication...” The current article opens as follows: “The KUBIS Dataverse Network (https://data.kb.dk/dvn) is a digital archive for scientific primary data for use by researchers at The University of Copenhagen. KUBIS Dataverse Network is available to researchers, departments and institutes at the University and research groups with an affiliation to the University of Copenhagen. The KUBIS Dataverse Network was established on the basis of the results of a "Report of a qualitative study of social sciences collection, use and sharing of primary data" (in Danish) (http://www.hprints.org/hprints-00451000). This report concluded, among other things, that there was an urgent need among a considerable part of the surveyed researchers for backup procedures and safe archiving of research data. Furthermore that there was a need to be able to archive data in many different formats: audio, images, text, numbers, etc. In addition there was a desire amongst scientists to share data with others and that the researcher him or herself could control who had access to these data. The KUBIS Dataverse Network serves as an additional backup system, which archives data in a structured form for both short and medium term preservation. It can also serve as a way of sharing data. Each researcher/group can create his/her own Dataverse in the KUBIS Dataverse Network and can store and process the data, and if he/she chooses to share his/her data. The open source application was developed by The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University... The KUBIS Dataverse Network is not hosted in the cloud, but on secure servers at the Royal Library / Copenhagen University Library and Information Service, using 256-bit encryption. The Dataverse Network is hierarchically organized with a number of dataverses (each created by e.g. individual researchers, university institutes, or a research project groups). Each dataverse creator has the option to create one or more ‘studies’ in that particular dataverse (as a top level organization of the contents). Files can be public or restricted as default, but each file can be set to public, restricted to all, or restricted to all but the persons or groups granted access by the uploader. Each study is given a persistent identifier (Handle) at upload and version history is saved, enabling the author to give permanent links/handles to the uploaded data. When creating a study and uploading a file, the uploader will be asked to fill in metadata for that file, which greatly enhances the possibility of reusing data at a later stage by the same researcher or others he/she might give permission. These metadata are typically filled in at the study-level, so the amount of metadata one has to fill in for individual files is limited...”