A Comparative Review of Various Data Repositories

Any fish can tell you: It’s important to know the waters you’re swimming in. To that end, Usability Researcher Derek Murphy and Product Research Specialist Julian Gautier have put together a spreadsheet that compares Dataverse’s features, usage, and governance with other prominent online data repositories. In this way, we sought to discover trends in repository design to help inform future development of Dataverse. Now we would like to share our findings with the community.

Our comparative review covers eight repositories selected for their similarity to Dataverse. We chose to look at repositories rather than platforms, to help us evaluate things from a researcher’s perspective. We compared these eight repositories along three broad topics, with each divided into subcategories. Under Software Features, we listed features that we’ve observed in multiple repositories. We hoped to discover areas where Dataverse was falling behind, and areas where it’s excelling. Under Governance/Organization we looked at the business models and policies of the repositories, to see what kinds of practices are common. Under Content we listed statistics on usage of the repositories and the materials contained within them.

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