DataBites | Jan 29: Research Data Repositories In Canada

Mike Nason | Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian

Introductions

It's me, Mike! Hello! I hope you're well, despite [gestures broadly] the roiling and profound horrors.

I'm your Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian.  

My job is about helping you make the results of your research as accessible to the public (or, relevant research communities) as you need them to be, whether that's due to funding mandates, personal interest, or a sort of proactive capitulation.

I am here to help you. It is what librarians are for.

research data management
tri-agency oa requirements
open access publishing
scholar profiles
repositories
digital publishing
open educational resources
open infrastructure
persistent identifiers
scholarly publishing
scholarly communications
academic integrity
bad-faith publishers

This workshop will introduce the landscape of research data repositories in Canada.

It will provide a practical overview of how to discover, evaluate and select appropriate repositories for different data types and disciplines.

Secondly, we'll talk about some places you can visit to find existing research data from Canadian researchers.

You might be surprised to learn that you can find this data in some different places than where you might go to share it.  

Finding Data

Firstly, we'll address places you might post, publish, or otherwise share your research data. Where you choose to put your work is an important decision, and there are a number of factors to consider in evaluating a deposit location. For our purposes, "sharing" can be synonymous with the following verbs (and probably others):

• publishing
• posting
• depositing

Sharing Data

I'm going to use the word "Dataverse" a lot in this presentation. Dataverse is referred to in a few contexts and it's useful to understand what we mean when we say it. 

Dataverse is an open source software platform maintained by The Dataverse Project at Harvard.

"Dataverse" is also shorthand for what we call repositories that use this software. 

A quick note...

Where you can deposit your research data, and how to choose.

Sharing Canadian Research Data

Institutional | Repositories affiliated with, and managed by, a specific research institution.

Federal | Repositories maintained and managed by government agencies or research organizations.

Disciplinary | Repositories for specific kinds of data, regardless of affiliation.  

As a researcher, you'll have a wide range of options for places to share your data. How you chose will depend on a number of factors, such as: 

• where you're employed;
• where your colleagues are employed;
• your research field;
• size/scope of the data itself;
• access/restriction requirements.

Repository Flavours

These places are multidisciplinary and managed, primarily, by the institutions themselves. If you want to put your UNB stuff "where the UNB stuff goes", regardless of discipline, this is the way. These platforms both store all their material on Canadian servers. 

"Borealis"

Borealis is a shared data repository initiative for Canadian institutions, hosted by Scholar's Portal. It's a network of "dataverses", subscribed to by schools across the country. You can find the data repo for most Canadian schools here.

UNB Dataverse

UNB Libraries runs an installation of Dataverse in which researchers can deposit their data. We call it the UNB Dataverse. If you're a researcher at UNB, you can contact us and we'll help you out! 

Your easiest and most likely option is to deposit your research in either the UNB Dataverse or the "Borealis"-based institutional dataverse of a co-author or colleague. Dataverse gives you pretty broad control over access to materials and subsets of research data while still facilitating storage and preservation. 

Institutional

The Federated Research Data Repository is defacto and entirely open access.

FRDR

The Federated Research Data Repository, or "furr durr", is a service maintained by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada on Canadian infrastructure.

FRDR is a great place to go to deposit your data if you meet any of the following:

• you've got an enormous volume of data that your institution can't easily handle in their data repository
• your institution doesn't have it's own repository yet
• you're working on a pan-Canadian project with the involvement of many institutions
• you're working independently as a researcher not currently affiliated with a specific institution or organization
• you're able to make your data fully open access

Federal

Many of the more specific disciplinary repositories (at least in the Canadian context) won't even have a public-facing deposit option. 

...

Here's a list of most of the repositories in Canada in this space as indexed by the service "Lunaris" (which we'll be discussing here in a minute). There's many!

There are a wide variety of smaller, disciplinary data repositories hosted in Canada. However, it's broadly safe to say you'll know when you should be depositing to them. These repositories are maintained by government bodies, counties, municipalities... etc. They aren't, broadly, open for public deposit.

Disciplinary

Where to look for Canadian research data in the wild

Finding Canadian Research Data

Individual Repos

Any repository that contains material will have some kind of search interface specific to that repository. Sometimes you know which school houses data but are missing specifics. Learning to comb through a repo is handy!

OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE is a European initiative to connect researchers to materials stored in repositories around the world. It doesn't just index Canadian research, but everything in FRDR and Borealis will also be indexed here. 

Lunaris

Lunaris is a discovery layer for Canadian research data. It's  maintained by Scholar's Portal, the same folks who host Dataverse. It indexes the vast majority of Canadian data repos. 

The process of finding Canadian research (or, maybe more specifically, Canadian research stored in Canadian places), is a little more straightforward. One of the beautiful things about the research data open infrastructure is how good it is at sharing and distribution. This means you can find shared data from a wide variety of approaches. What I'd like to make is the following recommendations for making your life a little easier.

Finding

If you have questions, we are always always always happy to help out. You can find us by going to:

https://lib.unb.ca/rdm

You don't need to know everything! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This has been a real "how much can you reasonably cover about this in 15 minutes without making people deeply confused" kind of topic.

Thank You!