On the role of research data centres in the management of publication-related research data

Abstract

This paper summarizes the findings of an analysis among scientific infrastructure service providers (mainly from Germany but also from other European countries). These service providers have been evaluated with regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data in the field of social sciences, especially economics. For this purpose we conducted a desk research and an online survey among 46 research data centres, library networks and public archives; almost 48% responded to our survey. We found out that almost three quarters of all respondents do generally store externally generated research data – which also applies to publication-related data. Almost 75% of all respondents also store and host the code of computation / the syntax of statistical analyses. If self-compiled software components are used to generate research outputs, only 40% of all respondents will accept these software components for storing and hosting. Eight out of ten institutions also stated to have taken specific actions for digital long-term preservation of their data. With regard to the documentation of stored and hosted research data almost 70% of all respondents claimed to use the metadata schema of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); Dublin Core was used by 30 percent (multiple answers were permitted). Almost two thirds also used persistent identifiers to facilitate citation of these datasets. Three in four respondents also stated to support researchers in creating metadata for their data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) for uploading or searching datasets currently have not yet been implemented by any of the respondents. Least common is the use of semantic technologies like RDF.