What Is A Repository For? – Building the Commons

“If you haven’t heard, in 2024 Humanities Commons will be launching a completely reimagined open-access repository. It’s currently under heavy construction. So we’ve been asking ourselves: Why does the Commons have a repository in the first place? At our heart we are a social network, a hub for scholarly exchange. Most of us don’t think “repository” when we think about social networks like Mastodon or Instagram or Facebook. So what exactly is a repository? And why will the new repository be so vital to the life of the Commons?…

How will the new Commons repository broadcast researchers’ work? Reaching an audience is partly about open access. This is not just a matter of letting visitors view the works on the repository site free-of-charge. It is also about letting other open access services and sites “re-broadcast” works from the Commons collection. So we will offer free access to the Commons repository in the formats that other tools and aggregators can use: a REST API, OAI-PMH streams, and (later on) the COAR Notify protocol. And we will embed data about each work in its repository page so that it is catalogued by services like Google Scholar. This extends the audience for members’ work far beyond the circle of people who visit the Commons….”

The Great Varieties of PIDs and How to Use Them: Navigating the Persistent Identifier Landscape

“DataCite, ORCID, and Crossref as international open scholarly infrastructure are adopted globally, but in APAC, national level PID providers also share the vision and work with their respective local communities to build services and tools to help them achieve data management goals. We are spoiled by the thriving PIDs ecosystem with PIDs for different types of entities, different levels of technical interoperability, different governance model, different user community, etc. – When the time comes to build an optimal PID integration or adoption strategy, how should one navigate the landscape?

Join the continued conversation in the Better Together APAC webinar series to dive into the topic of working with multiple PIDs, hear from DataCite, Crossref and ORCID, as well as organizations that have all ready built and implemented strategies that synergize the strength of different PIDs to provide their communities with the flexibility to meet varied use cases, making them truly better, together.”

Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Help Us Test v2 of the ROR API!

“After nearly a year of planning and community input, we are thrilled to release a beta version of ROR’s first major schema and API update, which is open to the public for testing through October 16, 2023. Please visit our v2 beta test documentation for detailed information on what’s new and how to participate in the beta test….”

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR) – Crossref

“Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Just yesterday, we published a summary of a recent workshop between funders and publishers on funding metadata workflows that we convened with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Sesame Open Science. As the report notes, “open funding metadata is arguably the next big thing” [in Open Science]. That being the case, we think this is the ideal time to strengthen our support of open funding metadata by beginning this transition to ROR….”

Frontiers | Editorial: Linked Open Bibliographic Data for Real-time Research Assessment

“.Despite the value of open bibliographic resources, they can involve inconsistencies that should be solved for better accuracy. As an example, OpenCitations mistakenly includes 1370 self-citations and 1498 symmetric citations as of April 30, 20221 . As well, they can involve several biases that can provide a distorted mirror of the research efforts across the world (Martín-Martín, Thelwall, Orduna-Malea, & Delgado López-Cózar, 2021). That is why these databases need to be enhanced from the perspective of data modeling, data collection, and data reuse. This goes in line with the current perspective of the European Union on reforming research assessment (CoARA, 2022). In this topical collection, we are honored to feature novel research works in the context of allowing the automatic generation of realtime research assessment reports based on open bibliographic resources. We are happy to host research efforts emphasizing the importance of open research data as a basis for transparent and responsible research assessment, assessing the data quality of open resources to be used in real-time research evaluation, and providing implementations of how online databases can be combined to feed dashboards for real-time scholarly assessment….”

Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Case Study: Why ResearchEquals Integrated ROR and Live Streamed It

“Chris Hartgerink, the founder of Liberate Science, discusses why and how they integrated ROR into the modular publishing platform ResearchEquals for author affiliations in user profiles and Crossref DOIs and explains why they live streamed all eight hours of the work….”

ARL Comments on NASA Public Access Plan: Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research – Association of Research Libraries

“On March 28, 2023, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) released a request for information on “NASA’S Public Access Plan: Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research.” The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is pleased to offer the following comments in response to this request….”

Aligning data-sharing policies: Meeting the moment | Commentary and opinion | Features | PND

“To make data sharing easier and to establish a clear baseline for what well-considered data-sharing policies should encompass, we recommend that funders:

1. Clearly specify which data grantees are required to share. Do you want grantees to share only data underlying published studies or all data generated during the funded project? Do you want raw or pre-processed data? If qualitative (not just quantitative) data are also covered by your policy, do you provide guidance for grantees on good practices for sharing qualitative data?

2. Consider incorporating code- and software-sharing requirements as a necessary extension of their data-sharing policies. To be able to reproduce results accurately and build upon shared data, researchers must not only have access to the files but also the code and software used to open and analyze data. Only then are data truly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The ORFG and the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) have prepared a more detailed brief.

3. Clearly specify the required timing of data sharing. The timing will vary based on what data are to be shared and what constitutes the event that triggers the sharing requirement. If data underlie a published study, complying or aligning with new federal policies will require data to be shared immediately at the time of publication. If, however, the policy requires sharing of all data, then the timing may be tied to the award period (as the NIH requires).

4. Require grantees to deposit data in trusted public repositories that assign a persistent identifier (e.g., DOI), provide the necessary infrastructure to host and export quality metadata, implement strategies for long-term preservation, and otherwise meet the National Science and Technology Council’s Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories. To make compliance easier for grantees, funders should provide a list of approved data repositories that meet these characteristics and are appropriate for the disciplines they fund.

5. Require grantees to share data under licenses that facilitate reuse. The recommended free culture license for data is the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). The reasoning behind this is two-fold: first, data do not always incur copyright and, therefore, reserving certain rights under other licenses may be inappropriate, and second, we should avoid attribution or license stacking that may occur as datasets are remixed and reused. Other options include the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licenses.

6. Strongly encourage grantees to share data according to established best practices. These include, but are not limited to: a) the FAIR Principles, which outline how to share data so they are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable; b) the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, which emphasize the importance of Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics in the context of Indigenous data, but could also inform the responsible management and sharing of data for other populations; and c) privacy rules, such as those provided under HIPAA. Funders should communicate that it is the responsibility of grantees to get the appropriate consent and ethical approval (e.g., from their institutional review board) that will allow them to collect and subsequently openly share de-identified data.

7. Allow grantees to include data sharing costs in their grant budgets. This could include costs associated with data management, curation, hosting, and long-term preservation. For many projects, data hosting costs will likely be minimal—several public repositories allow researchers to store significant amounts of data for free. For projects that will generate larger amounts of data, additional hosting costs can be budgeted. The most important cost may be the personnel time and expertise required to properly prepare data for sharing and reuse. Funders should consider increasing the allowable personnel costs to secure extra curation time for team

ORCID Increases Financial Support for ROR

By Élan Young

As use cases build in the global research ecosystem around persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research organizations, ORCID has recently increased its financial commitment to the first and only openly available organization identifier—Research Organization Registry (ROR).

Like ORCID, ROR operates an open, community-driven, noncommercial PID registry that is part of the interconnected network of global scholarly infrastructure. However, instead of disambiguating people as ORCID does, ROR disambiguates institution names, captures affiliations, links affiliation metadata to research outputs, and exchanges affiliation information across scholarly systems, making it an indispensable component of a research ecosystem that connects researchers with their research. ROR data is freely and openly available for anyone to use. As a demonstration of our intention to help ensure ROR’s success well into the future, ORCID recently increased its financial support of ROR by contributing $100,000 towards its sustenance and growth. We expect to be able to continue our annual support of ROR at this level for the foreseeable future.

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DOE Public Access Plan | Department of Energy

The Department of Energy Public Access Plan (June 2023) describes how DOE-funded research and digital data will become more open and available to the public and how DOE will use persistent identifiers to help ensure scientific and research integrity. Building on the previous DOE Public Access Plan (July 2014), the new Plan charts a path to:

Provide free, immediate access to peer-reviewed, scholarly publications;
Provide immediate access to scientific data displayed in or underlying publications and increased access to other data;
Use persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research outputs, researchers, organizations, and awards.

Policy and implementation guidance related to the publications and data components of the Plan will be issued by December 31, 2024, followed by policy and guidance for PID requirements….”