Multimodal manuscript representation: toward an open repository for manuscript research data

The aim of the RADAR (Research Data Repository) project is to set up and establish an infrastructure that facilitates research data management: the infrastructure will allow researchers to store, manage, annotate, cite, curate, search and find scientific data in a digital platform available at any time that can be used by multiple (specialized) disciplines. While appropriate and innovative preservation strategies and systems are in place for the big data communities (e.g., environmental sciences, space, and climate), the stewardship for many other disciplines, often called the “long tail research domains”, is uncertain. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the RADAR collaboration project develops a service oriented infrastructure for the preservation, publication and traceability of (independent) research data. The key aspect of RADAR is the implementation of a two-stage business model for data preservation and publication: clients may preserve research results for up to 15 years and assign well-graded access rights, or to publish data with a DOI assignment for an unlimited period of time. Potential clients include libraries, research institutions, publishers and open platforms that desire an adaptable digital infrastructure to archive and publish data according to their institutional requirements and workflows.

Research data have been increasingly published. A search function on a research data repository is crucial to improve the accessibility. Generally, the search is executed based on metadata written by the creators of the research data. However, such the metadata may not be sufficiently descriptive because there can exist features or usages that the creators did not expect. The information about features or usages generated by users might appear in citation contexts of research data in their scholarly papers. In this study, we set and discuss the hypothesis that citation contexts in scholarly papers are useful for research data search. First, we investigated whether adding citation contexts to the metadata can enrich information about the research data. Concretely, the existing metadata and the citation contexts were collected, and their overlap was examined. Furthermore, a retrieval experiment was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the citation contexts. The results indicated the usefulness of the citation contexts in scholarly papers.

PurposeThe study aims to investigate the utilisation of open research data repositories (RDRs) for storing and sharing research data in higher learning institutions (HLIs) in Tanzania.Design/methodology/approachA survey research design was employed to collect data from postgraduate students at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, Tanzania. The data were collected and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. A census sampling technique was employed to select the sample size for this study. The quantitative data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), whilst the qualitative data were analysed thematically.FindingsLess than half of the respondents were aware of and were using open RDRs, including Zenodo, DataVerse, Dryad, OMERO, GitHub and Mendeley data repositories. More than half of the respondents were not willing to share research data and cited a lack of ownership after storing their research data in most of the open RDRs and data security. HILs need to conduct training on using trusted repositories and motivate postgraduate students to utilise open repositories (ORs). The challenges for underutilisation of open RDRs were a lack of policies governing the storage and sharing of research data and grant constraints.Originality/valueResearch data storage and sharing are of great interest to researchers in HILs to inform them to implement open RDRs to support these researchers. Open RDRs increase visibility within HILs and reduce research data loss, and research works will be cited and used publicly. This paper identifies the potential for additional studies focussed on this area.

In the National University of Colombia there are currently 25 museums and collections including art, medicine, natural science, anthropology and history. Taken together, they comprise the largest, most diverse and most important museum in Colombia, and also the least known. The collections are the product of the conservation and research work of the university in the 141 years of its existence. In recent years, the National University of Colombia has not only become more aware of the importance of its cultural and scientific heritage, but also of the marginality of the work in the university museums. For that reason, in 2006 the university began to work on a Museums and Cultural Heritage Project to develop policies for the conservation, acquisition, documentation, research and communication of its own cultural heritage. The National University of Colombia hopes, through the development of a stronger, structured, ethical, responsible, efficient and representative project about Museums and Cultural Heritage to be better prepared for current challenges. In addition, the project hopes to generate a new landscape of accessibility to the museums and collections of the National University of Colombia. In short, the Museums and Cultural Heritage System of the National University of Colombia, through a ‘Museums portal’ located in a colonial building in Bogota known as Claustro de San Agustin (Cloister of St. Augustine) seeks to highlight the cultural heritage of the university, and become, beyond the classrooms and research centers of the campus, an important reference for the meeting of teachers, students, citizens and other cultural and academic institutions. Open door policy Colombia National University has 25 museums and collections, which together give the university the largest and most diverse collections in Columbia. The collections of science, art, medicine, natural science, and anthropology are the result of the research and collecting of the university during its 141 year history. The goal of the Cultural Patrimonio and Museums System (PMS) is to provide more public access to the cultural heritage of the university so that the university becomes meeting place; a place where teachers, students, academic and cultural institutions, social actors, and citizens can come together. In October 2007 the San Agustin Cloister opened its doors as the headquarters of the PMS of the National University. At that time we had 3 to 5 visitors daily and in December 2008, the average was 125 people daily. To date, we have had a total of 27,400 visitors. Yet even more important information can be obtained by looking beyond the numbers. The essential question is: Why is it so important open the doors of university to the citizens? The answer is as simple as it is political: because the audience has to have access in order to contribute to the preservation of National University heritage. Beyond the campus: The other visitors of the university museums The museums that are located on the campus of the university are known to the community because of the importance of the campus, but access to the museums was limited in the past because the activities of the museums were primarily linked to the university’s curriculum. The cloister is located strategically in downtown Bogota, in the main cultural zone. It is able to distribute information about the university museums, resulting in visits from people who work in the

The research data repository RADAR is designed to support the secure management, archiving, publication and dissemination of digital research data from completed scientific studies and projects. Developed as a collaborative project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) (2013-2016), the system is operated by FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure - and currently serves as a generic cloud service for about 20 universities and non-university research institutions. Since its launch, RADAR has witnessed significant changes in the landscape of research data repositories and the evolving needs of researchers, research communities and institutions. In our presentation within the “Enabling RDM” Track, we will show how RADAR is responding to these dynamic changes. In order to create a sufficiently large user base for the sustainable operation of the system, we have moved RADAR away from its previous single focus on a discipline-agnostic cloud service and towards a demand-driven functional optimisation. In 2021, we introduced an additional operating model for institutions (RADAR Local), where we operate a separate RADAR instance locally at the institution site exclusively using the institutional IT-infrastructure. In 2022 we opened up RADAR to new target groups with community-specific service offerings, in particular in the context of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). Beside the expansion of the functional scope, our ongoing development work focuses also on strengthening the system's support for the FAIR principles [1] and the concepts of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) [2] and Schema.org. Our presentation will outline recent RADAR developments and achievements as well as future plans thus providing solutions and synergy potential for the scientific community and for other service providers.

Open Access paradigms have changed how academic scholarship is published and disseminated, creating a new model for how research is shared. But how do these paradigms map onto museum research? This question is particularly pertinent when larger numbers of funded research projects include, or are led by, museums. This article considers some of the affordances and challenges of using Open Access principles and technologies to make visible the multifaceted modes of research that take place in a museum setting. Using the Science Museum Group as a case study, it focuses on how repositories offer one means to make research conducted in museums more accessible, while also broadening definitions of what a research output is. With the focus hitherto more on images and collection items, here we expand into the realm of exhibition and gallery outputs – the content which museums produce to narrate their collections’ stories and engage audiences. Many of these outputs may have been designed to have an ephemeral, physical lifespan, but through platforms such as repositories they can gain a digital afterlife, serving a new purpose as learning resources, research data, or indeed a record of curatorial and museological practice. The article ultimately argues that Open Access principles can aid museums (and the wider GLAM sector) in their mission to be transparent organisations for wide-ranging audiences.

In June 2020, ETH Zurich’s Research Collection celebrated its third anniversary. The Research Collection serves as an institutional repository for ETH Zurich that can host both publications and research data and is operated by the E-Publishing team at the ETH Library. Publishing research data and advising customers on research-data-specific questions in the publishing workflow has emerged as a new field of activity for the team. With over 800 research data items published over the last few years, we have now gained a good understanding of the actual use cases for publishing data in an institutional repository at a large university for science and technology. We regularly talk to researchers about the incentives and requirements for publishing their data and monitor what kind of data they deposit. In this paper, we share and discuss our insights. We present statistics on the types of deposited datasets and explain how “FAIR” they are in terms of accessibility, licences and metadata. We also discuss our workflows for checking datasets for formal quality criteria and compliance with institutional policies and how to bridge publishing and preservation requirements in a research data repository. Finally, we give an overview of two ongoing development projects. The first one aims to enable ETH researchers to deposit datasets directly from the data management tool openBIS, while the second one will deliver a solution for publishing large datasets via the Research Collection.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to examine the potential opportunities and risks of sharing agricultural research data in Tanzania identified in the existing research literature. Design/methodology/approach: The study involved a review of the literature on research data sharing practices. Findings: The findings indicate that, research data sharing have significant positive benefits among researchers such as increase high research impact; enhancing international community collaboration among researchers with same interests; improving scientific transparency and accuracy of data (Rappert and Bezuidenhout, 2016); increasing research output whereby a single dataset can be used to generate more than one article by different authors; and many more. The risks hampering data sharing practices includes researchers’ fears that data will be scooped, poached or misused (Onyancha, 2016); unreliable electric power; lack of fund to support research data sharing activities; absence of institutional governmental support for data management; perceived lack of evidence benefits (Leonelli, Rappert and Bezuidenhout, 2018); and others. However, in Tanzania research data sharing is relatively new, thus, no any governmental agency mandating or encouraging research data sharing; therefore, there is no research data management; no research open data repositories and no research data sharing policy at any agricultural institution in Tanzania. The study recommends that agricultural researchers should be sensitized to share their data, research data policy and data repositories should also be established to support data sharing practices in Tanzania. Originality and usefulness: From the available literature, this has been the first time that an effort has been made to examine the potential opportunities and risks of sharing agricultural research data in Tanzania. The study could be used by agricultural institutions and other institutions to assess the researchers’ needs in supporting research data sharing. Also, it can be used by the government and institutions to see the need of establishing open data repositories and open data policies to support research data sharing.

Research data must be testable. Science is all about verification and testing. To make data testable, tools used to produce, collect, and examine data during the research must be available. Quite often, however, these data become inaccessible once the work is over and the results being published. Hence, information and the related context must be provided on how research data are preserved and how they can be reproduced. Open Science is the international movement for making scientific research data properly accessible for research community. One of its major goals is building data repositories to foster wide dissemination of open data. The objectives of this research are to examine the features of research data, common repository platforms, and community requests for the purpose of designing functional requirements for research data repositories. To analyze the features of the research data, we use data curation profiles available from the Data Curation Center of the Purdue University, USA. For common repository platforms we examine Fedora Commons, iRODS, DataONE, Dataverse, Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC), and Figshare. We also analyze the requests from research community. To design a technical solution that would meet public needs for data accessibility and sharing, we take the requirements of RDA Repository Interest Group and the requests for the DataNest Community Platform developed by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). As a result, we particularize 75 requirement items grouped into 13 categories (metadata; identifiers; authentication and permission management; data access, policy support; publication; submission/ingest/management, data configuration, location; integration, preservation and sustainability, user interface; data and product quality). We hope that functional requirements set down in this study will be of help to organizations that consider deploying or designing data repositories. URL: http://ijkcdt.net/xml/13281/13281.pdf

Purpose In the present era, research data is a concern for researchers, as they are trying to find new ways to communicate their research findings and conclusions to other researchers in order to increase visibility and credibility. BRICS nations are fast emerging economies and contribute significantly in research output. This study makes an effort to analyze and explore the role of BRICS nations towards open access research data repository registered with Registry of Research Data Repositories. Design/methodology/approach The data were gathered from re3data repository, and the search was limited to BRICS nations. The data were further analyzed and tabulated as per set parameters, namely, country-wise distribution, types of contents, subject coverage and language diversity. Findings The findings depict that in terms of strength, India has the highest number of data repositories, thereby achieved the first rank among BRICS nations, and South Africa has the least number of data repositories, whereas in terms of content type and subject coverage, India again is leading among BRICS nations. The English language is used by repositories as the main language of the interface. Practical implications The study helps to understand the development of research data repositories by BRICS nations. The study is further beneficial to researchers, as Registry of Research Data Repository provides a single platform to access repositories from various disciplines. Readily available data saves time, money and efforts of researchers and helps the researcher in completing their research activity in a very short span of time. Originality/value The paper has investigated open access data repositories of BRICS nation that has not been attempted earlier. This gives readers comprehensive overview of research data repositories developed in fast emerging economies of the global. The paper can be very helpful for information managers, OA promoters and education and research policy makers to devise plans and policy bearing in mind the evolving research channels in emerging economies.

The study investigates the awareness and use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) by academic librarians in Zimbabwe’s research data repositories. PIDs are essential in ensuring the discoverability, accessibility, and citability of research data. However, little is known about the level of awareness and use of these tools among academic librarians in Zimbabwe. A sequential mixed methods approach was employed, beginning with a questionnaire administered to scholarly communication librarians who were purposively selected. Quantitative data from the questionnaires provided an overview of the current landscape regarding PIDs in Zimbabwean higher education institutions. This informed the design of a focus group discussion which allowed for a deeper exploration of the themes identified in the survey, facilitating an understanding of the challenges of using PIDs within universities. The findings indicated that although the librarians were aware of PIDs, no institution has an institutional research data repository in the country. Challenges that were faced in integrating PIDs include lack of expertise, unclear policies, and infrastructure costs. The study will be significant in informing policy development, capacity-building initiatives, and creating guidelines for integrating PIDs into research workflows.

Results of scientific work in chemistry can usually be obtained in the form of materials and data. A big step towards transparency and reproducibility of the scientific work can be gained if scientists publish their data in research data repositories in a FAIR manner. Nevertheless, in order to make chemistry a sustainable discipline, obtaining FAIR data is insufficient and a comprehensive concept that includes preservation of materials is needed. In order to offer a comprehensive infrastructure to find and access data and materials that were generated in chemistry projects, we combined the infrastructure Chemotion repository with an archive for chemical compounds. Samples play a key role in this concept: we describe how FAIR metadata of a virtual sample representation can be used to refer to a physically available sample in a materials’ archive and to link it with the FAIR research data gained using the said sample. We further describe the measures to make the physically available samples not only FAIR through their metadata but also findable, accessible and reusable.

Temporal data are crucial in many research activities within Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Heritage (CH). At the same time, there is a growing need for visualization tools to explore events in Linked Data (LD). This article investigates LD visualization tools that address event data in association with temporal data for research purposes in DH and CH. We analyze the availability of Wikidata visualization tools capable of handling event data for DH and CH research and propose ways to improve visualization tools to better represent temporal data in Wikidata. We identified 14 requirements based on principles from the information visualization domain, as well as an analysis of previous studies and existing tools. We design and develop a Wikidata-centric tool to meet these requirements. This tool is then evaluated through focus groups and questionnaires with DH and CH experts. The results of the evaluation show overall positive feedback and highlight the implicit need and value of visualization tools that handle events in Wikidata for research in DH and CH. In addition, they indicate the improved accessibility and visualization capabilities of Wikidata through the seven time-related functionalities of the tool.

La gestión de datos de investigación ha implicado acciones tempranas e inmediatas en las instituciones de educación superior en Colombia y en el mundo entero. En agosto del 2022, el Ministerio de Ciencias, Tecnologías e Innovación de Colombia publicó la Política Nacional de Ciencia Abierta, en cual, se expresan en sus metas y estrategias la implementación de servicios de gestión de datos de investigación y repositorio de datos. En la presente investigación se define el servicio de gestión de datos de investigación en la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, universidad pública con una población cercana a los 28.000 estudiantes y con más de 200 grupos de investigación. A través de la metodología referencia TOPE (Tecnology, Organization, People, Environment) se identificó una necesidad urgente de definir políticas, formación y estrategias de acompañamiento para la gestión de datos de investigación, así como el acompañamiento de las instancias de investigación y bibliotecas dentro de la propia institución; el diagnóstico de datos de investigación publicados por investigadores de la institución permitió identificar 599 datasets publicados en los últimos 12 años en diferentes repositorios como Mendeley Data, Zenodo, SiB Colombia - GBIF Colombia para, finalmente, definir, mediante la metodología Business Process Management Notation, el planteamiento del servicio de gestión de datos de investigación para toda la institución. Esta pesquisa plantea un escenario de respuesta a la política nacional y establece nuevas rutas orientadas a desarrollar un nivel de madurez a nivel institucional respecto a la gestión de datos de investigación en un contexto de ciencia abierta.

Abstract. The mission of digital Cultural Heritage (CH) repositories goes beyond engagement and dissemination; their research data should be approached and correlated spatially and semantically in the service of conservation and accessibility. Therefore, a flexible system is needed to expand, reuse and repurpose their content, addressing online collaboration, real time progress and ease of use. Towards this direction, the “METEORA” web-based platform is a novel and holistic approach to the organization, management and visualization of the 3D and 2D documentation products of CH sites. It integrates a multi-scale 3D viewer based on the 3DHOP framework, personalized information access and interactive tools for data retrieval and presentation. Emphasis is given in the development of a mid-level interface for creating, updating and maintaining 3DHOP’s functionalities and customizing information based on the user’s scientific specialty and field of interest. The proposed admin control panel updates the state of the current visualization, allows the integration of 3D models and multimedia and automates the creation of clickable points of interest on top of the 3D surfaces. It is based on a MySQL Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that supports the back-end User Interface (UI) with create, read, update and delete (CRUD) management functions of a typical RESTful service. Moreover, all the control mechanisms as well as the procedures of authentication, authorization and encryption of the credentials of the certified users are configured through the PHP scripting language and JSON files. The resulting platform achieves maximum adaptability in digital archiving of heterogeneous datasets and has increasing efficiency in representing all types of data supported by 3DHOP.