Description
EPFL has been an actor of open research for over two decades, as demonstrated by the Infoscience publication repository, launched in 2004. This collaboration between libraries and IT services has produced a feature-rich platform to support EPFL researchers in their Open Access endeavours, as well as a monitoring tool for EPFL's scholarly publications. However, no consensus was found among the stakeholders regarding the development of an equivalent service for datasets. Meanwhile, Zenodo was identified both by researchers and institutional service providers as a pragmatic solution to cover many urgent use cases. Therefore, an EPFL Community (i.e. collection) was set up in 2014 as a minimal way to monitor data dissemination activities.
As the creation of an EPFL data repository remained an elusive target, the idea arose to leverage the Zenodo EPFL Community to deliver new services. With the addition of a pragmatic curation policy, the Community empowers EPFL researchers to enhance the visibility and reusability of their datasets while promoting openness and the FAIR data principles. Accepted datasets gain benefits without any additional burden for the researchers: metadata records in Infoscience for broader institutional visibility, and long-term preservation in EPFL’s Academic Output Archive (ACOUA) when applicable. This approach has been received favourably by our users.
We leverage various technologies (browser scripting, REST APIs, and others) to streamline processes without excessive development costs. This poster presents the tools we have selected to support the curation process, and discusses the current status and future evolutions of our services.
Tagline
Setting up an institutional FAIR data repository requires significant resources that may not be available. We were able to bypass this barrier thanks to Zenodo. Using a pragmatic curation process and a few locally developed tools, we can deliver value-added services to our researchers.
| Keywords | Open research data; data curation; low-cost |
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