Category: Digital Repositories

"Motivations, Concerns and Selection Biases When Posting Preprints: A Survey of bioRxiv Authors"


Since 2013, the usage of preprints as a means of sharing research in biology has rapidly grown, in particular via the preprint server bioRxiv. Recent studies have found that journal articles that were previously posted to bioRxiv received a higher number of citations or mentions/shares on other online platforms compared to articles in the same journals that were not posted. However, the exact causal mechanism for this effect has not been established, and may in part be related to authors’ biases in the selection of articles that are chosen to be posted as preprints. We aimed to investigate this mechanism by conducting a mixed-methods survey of 1,444 authors of bioRxiv preprints, to investigate the reasons that they post or do not post certain articles as preprints, and to make comparisons between articles they choose to post and not post as preprints. We find that authors are most strongly motivated to post preprints to increase awareness of their work and increase the speed of its dissemination; conversely, the strongest reasons for not posting preprints centre around a lack of awareness of preprints and reluctance to publicly post work that has not undergone a peer review process. We additionally find evidence that authors do not consider quality, novelty or significance when posting or not posting research as preprints, however, authors retain an expectation that articles they post as preprints will receive more citations or be shared more widely online than articles not posted.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274441

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Data Platforms for Open Life Sciences – A Systematic Analysis of Management Instruments"


Open data platforms are interfaces between data demand of and supply from their users. Yet, data platform providers frequently struggle to aggregate data to suit their users’ needs and to establish a high intensity of data exchange in a collaborative environment. Here, using open life science data platforms as an example for a diverse data structure, we systematically categorize these platforms based on their technology intermediation and the range of domains they cover to derive general and specific success factors for their management instruments. Our qualitative content analysis is based on 39 in-depth interviews with experts employed by data platforms and external stakeholders. We thus complement peer initiatives which focus solely on data quality, by additionally highlighting the data platforms’ role to enable data utilization for innovative output. Based on our analysis, we propose a clearly structured and detailed guideline for seven management instruments. This guideline helps to establish and operationalize data platforms and to best exploit the data provided. Our findings support further exploitation of the open innovation potential in the life sciences and beyond.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276204

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"De Gruyter and Ubiquity Join Forces"


Ubiquity was founded by researchers in order to accelerate change towards open access and open science in 2012. Ubiquity publishes gold and diamond open access journals and books through its imprint Ubiquity Press, and supports 33 independent university presses with publishing services. Along with these partners, Ubiquity currently provides over 800 open access journals and more than 2,800 open access books. Ubiquity extended its services in 2021 with the launch of its institutional repositories platform, adding capacity to drive green open access and the dissemination of all research outputs, such as preprints and data. . . .

By acquiring and investing in Ubiquity, De Gruyter will grow its existing open access and service business further and help the Ubiquity team reach their goals as an open research publisher and provider of open publishing services. As part of De Gruyter, Ubiquity will continue pursuing its mission to make quality open access publishing affordable and retain a high degree of independence to do so. The Ubiquity team and CEO and founder Brian Hole will keep working from their London office and remotely to continue their successful journey of researcher-led publishing.

https://cutt.ly/yNyI6sK

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"Nine Best Practices for Research Software Registries and Repositories"


Scientific software registries and repositories improve software findability and research transparency, provide information for software citations, and foster preservation of computational methods in a wide range of disciplines. Registries and repositories play a critical role by supporting research reproducibility and replicability, but developing them takes effort and few guidelines are available to help prospective creators of these resources. To address this need, the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group convened a Task Force to distill the experiences of the managers of existing resources in setting expectations for all stakeholders. In this article, we describe the resultant best practices which include defining the scope, policies, and rules that govern individual registries and repositories, along with the background, examples, and collaborative work that went into their development.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1023

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"OpenStack Swift: An Ideal Bit-Level Object Storage System for Digital Preservation "


A bit-level object storage system is a foundational building block of long-term digital preservation (LTDP). To achieve the purposes of LTDP, the system must be able to: preserve the authenticity and integrity of the original digital objects; scale up with dramatically increasing demands for preservation storage; mitigate the impact of hardware obsolescence and software ephemerality; replicate digital objects among distributed data centers at different geographical locations; and to constantly audit and automatically recover from compromised states. . . . In this paper, we present OpenStack Swift, an open-source, mature and widely accepted cloud platform, as a practical and proven solution with a case study at the University of Alberta Library. We emphasize the implementation, application, cost analysis and maintenance of the system, with the purpose of contributing to the community with an exceedingly robust, highly scalable, self-healing and comparatively cost-effective bit-level object storage system for long-term digital preservation.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.782

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"Increasing the Reuse of Data through FAIR-enabling the Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories"


To address this gap the FAIRsFAIR project developed a number of tools and resources that facilitate the assessment of FAIR-enabling practices at the repository level as well as the FAIRness of datasets within them. These include the CoreTrustSeal+FAIRenabling Capability Maturity model (CTS+FAIR CapMat), a FAIR-Enabling Trustworthy Digital Repositories-Capability Maturity Self-Assessment template, and F-UJI, a web-based tool designed to assess the FAIRness of research data objects.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.852

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"FAIREST: A Framework for Assessing Research Repositories "

"In this article, we introduce the FAIREST principles, a framework inspired by the well-known FAIR principles, but designed to provide a set of metrics for assessing and selecting solutions for creating digital repositories for research artefacts. The goal is to support decision makers in choosing such a solution when planning for a repository, especially at an institutional level.. . . We further describe an assessment of 11 widespread solutions, with the goal to provide an overview of the current landscape of research data repository solutions, identifying gaps and research challenges to be addressed."

https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00159

"Factors Contributing to Repository Success in Recruiting Data Deposits"

https://doi.org/10.29173/iq1037

"While quite a few studies outline researchers’ data management needs and how repositories can meet those needs, few have assessed the success of various approaches. This study examines infrastructure for accepting data into repositories and identifies factors influential in recruiting data deposits."

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