Requirements and Recommendations for University Research Data Repository : A Case Study

The changing research culture poses new requirements on research communities across disciplines. The availability of different research outputs requires appropriate infrastructure in order to publish and recognize them as research contributions. Institutional repositories (IR) provide such support for research outputs generated as part of the research. In this work, we conduct a survey to assess the research data management activities and services for an IR at a university setting. The survey results show an increasing presence of research data (RD) as well as a need for an IR component to support it for the participating communities. The survey reveals that common practices among researchers are to save data into spreadsheets, text documents, and relational databases, which they manage personally without any institutional support. Most of them store this data on a personal computer or portable storage drives. Despite these storing practices, which are not optimal for sharing, most participants have a need of sharing their data, and they do it mostly using email attachments. The survey also reveals features that repositories should provide, mostly RD creation- and dissemination-related activities, but also covering those that relate to backup and access-granting