The Data Deposit Workflow: Involving Researchers in Timely Dataset Upload and Description

Data repositories are established to ease data sharing, to preserve research data, and to promote the visibility of institutional data assets. Research projects that generate datasets may lack funding for the organization and long-time preservation of the collected data. On the other hand, researchers are more motivated to deposit data as they become aware of the importance that associated datasets can have on the visibility of their research. One of the hard issues in research data management is the setup of an easy communication channel between researchers and data curators. Following the setup of an experimental data repository at U.Porto, we reflected on the need for intuitive tools for researchers to contribute to data deposit and data description. We present two experimental online tools for streamlining the data deposit workflow. The evaluation of the tools with a panel of researchers will allow us to assess their usefulness before planning the integration of the tools with our extended DSpace repository