Abstract
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.
Highlights
The access and sharing of research data have been emphasized by the government [1], funding agencies [2,3,4] and scholarly communities [5,6]
This study examined research data curation practices in Institutional Repositories (IRs) based on Activity Theory [44,45]
Once the coordination is completed, each activity and their actions are conducted throughout the data and data curation lifecycles
Summary
The access and sharing of research data have been emphasized by the government [1], funding agencies [2,3,4] and scholarly communities [5,6]. The increased access to research data elevates the impact, efficiency, and effectiveness of scientific activities and funding opportunities. There is an increasing number of academic institutions that plan to provide research data services through their Institutional Repositories (IRs; [8,9]). Many research universities already have operational IRs that provide open access to the digital content produced by the universities’ communities, only a small number of institutions provide research data services through their IRs [10].
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