Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-03, Vol.12 (3), p.e0173987-e0173987
Main Authors: Lee, Dong Joon, Stvilia, Besiki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic libraries
Academies and Institutes - organization & administration
Archives & records
Best practice
Colleges & universities
Community
Computer and Information Sciences
Consciousness
Data Curation
Digital curation
Digital libraries
Dublin Core Format
Engineering and Technology
Funding
Information science
Information sharing
Institutional repositories
Internet
Linked Data
Management
Medical research
Metadata
People and Places
Physical Sciences
Qualitative analysis
Quality
R&D
Repositories
Research & development
Research and Analysis Methods
Research data management
Research design
Research facilities
Research institutions
Research libraries
Research programs
Resource Description Framework-RDF
Schools
Science Policy
Semantic web
Studies
United States
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Summary:The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0173987