[This is a post from our colleagues of the Research Data Office]
Today, November 29, is World Digital Preservation Day. Tilburg University puts four online data archives in the spotlight that are committed to sustainable research data:
All these four research data archives (or often called repositories) meet the worldwide CoreTrustSeal quality mark or its earlier version, Data Seal of Approval.
LIS Research Support manages the research data repository Tilburg University (TiU) Dataverse. Two researchers on how they use TiU Dataverse:
The Department of Social Psychology at the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences was the first Department to use TiU Dataverse as an integral part of the Department’s data policy.
Associate Professor Mark Brandt is member of the Department’s Data Committee. One of the accomplished tasks of the Committee was to facilitate and reward good research practices. He is an inspiring advocate for institutionalizing solid science over the years:
” ‘If you build it, they will come’ is a famous line from the American movie Field of Dreams. The “it” refers to a baseball field and the “they” refers to ghosts of baseball players, but it applies equally well to our use of Dataverse. Many people thought that consistent storage of scientific data was unrealistic (just like ghosts), but it turns out that if you build it, people will use it.”
In the last year, there has been a strong increase in the submission of data sets. Researchers often choose for an online data repository because it is required by research funders, academic journals, or the institutional data policy. But more and more researchers are also seeing the benefits of storing their research data in a sustainable manner.
Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (TSHD) also made Dataverse part of the School’s data policy, but different than the Department of Social Psychology researchers deposit their own datasets.
Veni laureate Lisanne Huis in ‘t Veld is associated with the department Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at TSHD. She is also senior postdoc researcher at the department of Donor Studies at Sanquin Research. Writing her data management plan for NWO she chose to deposit her data sets in TiU Dataverse at the end of her research project:
“Writing the DMP forced me to think carefully about the type of data I was going to collect during my project, and how I should store the different types of complex data in such a way that they can be reused by other researchers. As the main research technique (Infrared Thermal Imaging) is novel and potentially privacy sensitive, I need to store it at a safe location and in several formats each with a different level of accessibility. Additionally, the data will take up a lot of space and requires detailed metadata to be of use.”
Whatever procedure is used, the Research Data Office is available to support researchers with the depositing of their data sets. Website www.tilburguniversity.edu/rdo, email rdo@tilburguniversity.edu.
Open if possibleTilburg University (TiU) Dataverse is the institutional data archive available for researchers of all Schools. It hosts multiple dataverses [Dataverse diagram], one for each School. The School’s dataverses contains dataset(s) or Department’s dataverses. Each dataset contains descriptive metadata and data files (including documentation and/or code that accompany the data). [Dataset diagram]
Before data sets are published, data curators of the Research Data Office check them for example for the use of sustainable file formats and complete documentation with the data sets.
How to set up your own digital archive in seven easy steps: Your 7 steps to sustainable data.
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