Research data shared service is well into alpha

Over the past two years, we [Jisc team] have been developing a solution for researchers and support staff within universities to enable them to deposit and preserve research data for the long-term, while also monitoring and quality-checking the process. We set out with a critical requirement: the service must provide an oversight of all gaps where an institution is not complying with funder requirements and best practice around sharing and preserving data, so that administrators could focus on following up with the research groups that need help, rather than wasting their time on figuring out who those groups are.

…

Research data shared service: what does it do exactly?

The research data shared service provides a data repository function where researchers can deposit and share research data at an institutional level. In the background this data is automatically preserved after researcher deposit and after its metadata is verified and approved by an administrator. We are developing 3 major building blocks for the end to end offer: repository, preservation and analytics. Currently we are in the alpha stage of development and are going into beta in 2018 before launching the service. We are working with 16 UK universities and more than a dozen vendors that are either supplying their system (like figshare and Preservica), or supporting the development of the service and the open source platforms within the service (like Arkivum, Artefactual Systems, Digirati, Leidos, Ocasta etc).

Alpha: deposit and preserve

In alpha, we are automating the flow of data between the repository and the preservation systems (and creating automated preservation ingest workflows). This removes the extra manual upload of data to the preservation system and starting a preservation workflow. The research data support and the preservation specialists within institutions would have the ability to check the quality of the data and metadata on both systems with administrator roles.

On the repository side, we are working with figshare and are also developing the open-source Samvera repository inhouse. On the preservation side, we are working with Arkivum and Artefactual Systems on archivematica, and Preservica.

…