Why figshare? Choosing a new technical infrastructure for 4TU.ResearchData | Open Working

“4TU.ResearchData is an international repository for research data in science, engineering and design. After over 10 years of using Fedora, an open source repository system, to run  4TU.ResearchData, we have made a decision to migrate a significant part of our technical infrastructure to a commercial solution offered by figshare. Why did we decide to do it? Why now, at a time of increasing concerns about relying on proprietary solutions, particularly associated with large publishing houses, to run scholarly communication infrastructures? (see for example, In pursuit of open science, open access is not enough and the SPARC Landscape Analysis)

We anticipate that members of our community, as well as colleagues that use or manage scholarly communications infrastructures might be wondering the same. We are therefore explaining our thinking in this blogpost, hoping it will facilitate more discussion about such developments in the scholarly communications infrastructure….”

Supporting FAIR Data Principles with Fedora

Abstract:  Making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable is an important but challenging goal. From an infrastructure perspective, repository technologies play a key role in supporting FAIR data principles. Fedora is a flexible, extensible, open source repository platform for managing, preserving, and providing access to digital content. Fedora is used in a wide variety of institutions including libraries, museums, archives, and government organizations. Fedora provides native linked data capabilities and a modular architecture based on well-documented APIs and ease of integration with existing applications. As both a project and a community, Fedora has been increasingly focused on research data management, making it well-suited to supporting FAIR data principles as a repository platform. Fedora provides strong support for persistent identifiers, both by minting HTTP URIs for each resource and by allowing any number of additional identifiers to be associated with resources as RDF properties. Fedora also supports rich metadata in any schema that can be indexed and disseminated using a variety of protocols and services. As a linked data server, Fedora allows resources to be semantically linked both within the repository and on the broader web. Along with these and other features supporting research data management, the Fedora community has been actively participating in related initiatives, most notably the Research Data Alliance. Fedora representatives participate in a number of interest and working groups focused on requirements and interoperability for research data repository platforms. This participation allows the Fedora project to both influence and be influenced by an international group of Research Data Alliance stakeholders. This paper will describe how Fedora supports FAIR data principles, both in terms of relevant features and community participation in related initiatives.

DuraSpace | Open technologies for durable digital content

“The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University were awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant for Libraries earlier this year. The aim of the funding is to to assist work on the API Extensions framework for Fedora 4 platform that will facilitate the exposure of repository contents as linked data web resources.”