Crosswalk among Prominent Open Research Data Repositories

Abstract

Open Access is a synergised global movement using Internet to provide equal access to knowledge that once hid behind the subscription paywalls. Many new models for scholarly communication have emerged in recent past. One among them is institutional or digital repositories which archive the scholarly content of an organization. While the concept of Open Access opened new arena for institutional or digital repositories in the form of Open repositories. Likewise, the Open repositories for Research Data Management (RDM) are initiative to organize, store, cite, preserve, and share the collected data derived from the research. There are many multidisciplinary and subject specific open repositories for RDM offering exquisite features for perpetual management of research data. The objective of the present study is to evaluate features of popular Open Data Repositories-Zenodo, FigShare, Harvard Dataverse and Mendeley Data. The evaluation provided insights about the key features of the selected Open Data Repositories and which enable us to select the best among them. Zenodo provides maximum data upload limit. While the major features required by a researcher like DOI, File Types, citation support, licenses, search (metadata harvesting) are provided by all three repositories.