Building an Open Data Repository for a Specialized Research Community: Process, Challenges and Lessons

Abstract

In 2009, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University began building an open access digital collection of social science experimental data, metadata, and associated files produced by ISPS researchers. The digital repository was created to support the replication of research findings and to enable further data analysis and instruction. Content is submitted to a rigorous process of quality assessment and normalization, including transformation of statistical code into R, an open source statistical software. Other requirements included: (a) that the repository be integrated with the current database of publications and projects publicly available on the ISPS website; (b) that it offered open access to datasets, documentation, and statistical software program files; (c) that it utilized persistent linking services and redundant storage provided within the Yale Digital Commons infrastructure; and (d) that it operated in accordance with the prevailing standards of the digital preservation community. In partnership with Yale’s Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), the ISPS Data Archive was launched in the fall of 2010. We describe the process of creating the repository, discuss prospects for similar projects in the future, and explain how this specialized repository fits into the larger digital landscape at Yale.

Data objects and documenting scientific processes: An analysis of data events in biodiversity data papers

“…Data publication is a device to bridge the gap between human and computers within the lifecycle of research data (Lawrence et al, 2011). Metadata plays central roles towards achieving this goal, despite the facts that creating metadata is highly labor-intensive (Borgman, 2012;Peer & Green, 2012) and its creation is deeply situated in individual communities with own needs (Edwards et al, 2011;. In an effort to classify metadata for data archives, Lawrence and colleagues (Lawrence, Lowry, Miller, Snaith, & Woolf, 2009) categorized four groups of metadata serving different purposes: browse metadata, archive metadata, character metadata, and discovery metadata.…”

New Curation Software: Step-by-Step Preparation of Social Science Data and Code for Publication and Preservation

“…ISPS has supported a Data Archive 17 since 2010 (Peer and Green, 2012). The Archive includes research output by ISPS-affiliated researchers, with emphasis on experimental design and methods.…”

“…Data archives such as the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR 24 ) and UK Data Archive (UKDA 25 ) have established practices that are tried and tested to ensure "that data are accurate, complete, well documented, and that they are delivered in a way that maximizes their use and reuse" (Peer, Green and, Stephenson 2014, p.16). The ISPS curation workflow is based on the ICPSR pipeline (Peer, 2014b), and has been adapted for research output from RCTs in the social sciences (Peer and Green, 2012).…”

Researcher-Library Collaborations: Data Repositories as a Service for Researchers

“…The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) emerged from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan to encompass a consortium of institutional partners (Lyle, 2014). Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure collaborates with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies on an open data repository in the social sciences (Peer & Green, 2012). …”