Three years of publishing data in ETH Zurich’s Research Collection: Lessons learned and new developments

Résumé

In June 2020, ETH Zurich’s Research Collection celebrated its third anniversary. The Research Collection serves as an institutional repository for ETH Zurich that can host both publications and research data and is operated by the E-Publishing team at the ETH Library. Publishing research data and advising customers on research-data-specific questions in the publishing workflow has emerged as a new field of activity for the team. With over 800 research data items published over the last few years, we have now gained a good understanding of the actual use cases for publishing data in an institutional repository at a large university for science and technology. We regularly talk to researchers about the incentives and requirements for publishing their data and monitor what kind of data they deposit. In this paper, we share and discuss our insights. We present statistics on the types of deposited datasets and explain how “FAIR” they are in terms of accessibility, licences and metadata. We also discuss our workflows for checking datasets for formal quality criteria and compliance with institutional policies and how to bridge publishing and preservation requirements in a research data repository. Finally, we give an overview of two ongoing development projects. The first one aims to enable ETH researchers to deposit datasets directly from the data management tool openBIS, while the second one will deliver a solution for publishing large datasets via the Research Collection.