15 min
Learning Objectives:
Open science and FAIR principles encourage scholars to put more of their content online in an open format. Scholarly works can be added online repositories that centralize, store, and share the results. Most repositories will be associated with a DOI Registration Agency and will generate DOIs for every item that is stored. Generating a DOI is one factor that you can use to determine whether a repository is trustworthy. There are different types of repositories that may be appropriate for your scholarly works.
There are many repositories that focus on a specific type of data or data from a certain field. If one exists for your data, subject specific repositories are great because individuals looking for a specific type of data will know to check that repository. A subject-specific repository can collect data from researchers around the world and customize the way the data is displayed. This can make it easier to find and reuse the data. One challenge for domain-specific repositories is ensuring a consistent source of funding-you should monitor the repositories you use to ensure that your data remains available.
You can find a good listing of subject-specific repositories at PLOS.
A more complete list of repositories is available at re3data
Many institutions host data repositories, often through the library, to preserve the data collected at the institution. These repositories are often general and can take any scholarly works that are associated with the institution. Because these repositories are associated with an institution, they may have a more consistent source of funding. However, they often do not have the customization available in a domain-specific repository.
An example of an institutional data repository is CaltechDATA
A number of general repositories exist that can collect any type of scholarly output. These can be associated with a publisher, like Mendeley Data or Figshare. Some institutions also run general repositories that are open to all, like the Harvard Dataverse, Dryad, or Zenodo. These general repositories can be free (Mendeley Data, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo), charge per submission (Dryad), or have size limitations (Figshare). We’re going to use Zenodo because it is free, open, and associated with CERN which provides institutional backing and permanance.
To begin, go to Zenodo and get an account by clicking the sign up button in the upper right hand corner. Then click the ‘Upload’ link at the top of the screen and the green ‘New Upload’ button. You’ll see a place to drag and drop the files you’re going to upload. Then click the green upload button.If the uploader gives an error message you may have to refresh the page first.
Click on the “Reserve a DOI button”. You’ll get a DOI that you can use to reference your scholarly content, but it wont’t resolve until you publish your record.
Next, you’ll have to enter the metadata that describes your scholarly work, some of which will be registered with your DOI.
First, select the type of object you’re uploading. Is it a publication, poster, presentation, data set, image, video/audio, software, or lesson? You can have multiple individual files associated with a Zenodo record, and you’ll want to group them in bunches that other users would want to download together. For example, if you have lots of data files from the same experiment you would want to upload them to one record. If you have presentations on different topics you would want to upload them to separate records.
In most cases you’ll want to let Zenodo add the DOI and publication date.
Next, enter a title, authors, and description. Make your description detailed enough so that others can understand the files you’re uploading. It’s also good to enter some keywords to enable discovery.
Zenodo allows your files to be open, embargoed, restricted, or closed. Embargoed files become public on a selected data. Access to restricted files can provided to specified users, and closed files are completely restricted. Because we’re doing open science, select open!
You should select a standard license for your files. There is a lot of issues to consider when selecting a license, and we have an entire lesson on the topic. For data sets a “Creative Commons Zero” license is a good choice. For presentations and images a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0” license is a good choice. On Zenodo you sometimes have to type out the entire license name before it finds it.
Zenodo has user-selected communities of records. These are self-organizing classifications, and there may or may not be one that matches your work.
The funding field in Zenodo is specific to European Union grants (FP7 and Horizon 2020 programs). If you get funding under these programs your work will automatically be reported. Zenodo currently recommends you add additional funding in the “Additional Notes” field (this is less than optimal).
Related identifiers are a way to connect different works together. For example, let’s say you have a data set that is associated with a paper. You can add the paper DOI to Zenodo as a related identifier with “is supplemented by this upload” as the description in the second field.
Note: This relation is registered with type “is supplemented by” with DataCite because all DataCite related identifiers are in referenced to the registered work.
You can provide some basic descriptions of contributors to a work that are not authors. Your options are a bit more basic than discussed in the attribution lesson.
There other more specialized metadata categories for References, Subjects, and other descriptors. These may or may not be relevant to your work.
Once you have your metadata entered, click Save. Then click Publish to share your record. You’ll see that Zenodo brings you to the public record page for your work. Zenodo provides a citation that includes your newly created DOI. We’ll be using this DOI throughout the rest of the workshop.
We can utilize the first set of skills for getting metadata from a DOI on the DOI we just got from Zenodo. We’ll utilize DataCite instead of CrossRef, but it works exactly the same. In your web browser go to:
https://api.datacite.org/works/10.5281/zenodo.6780628
substituting your DOI. We can also get citations. In a terminal window type
curl -LH “Accept:text/x-bibliography; style=apa” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6780628
and you’ll get a APA formatted ciation for your new scholarly work!
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