“It’s World Digital Preservation Day on the 7th of November John.”
“Better write a blog then, Paul”
“Ah. Okay.”
Soooooo… What is it about preservation that so often makes it an afterthought when it comes to publishing data sets (for researchers at least)?
These days, if you ask a researcher about FAIR, or open data, or open science, or funder mandates (“Thou shalt keep the data underpinning your publication available for ten years from the last time it’s been accessed”) they’ll more than likely have heard about the concepts at the very least, if not be able to show you their data management plan. But when it comes to actually preserving the data… it all falls apart a bit. Why?
Pain points
Quite apart from the problem of funding preservation (“I forgot to put that in my budget”) one of the biggest pain points is that researchers aren’t preservation specialists. They’re specialists in their own field and (most) haven’t got the time or inclination to learn a whole new set of concepts and processes (OAIS? Normalisation?? File format migration???).
What if they could deposit and preserve in one easy process at the touch of a button…?
Well, they can (you knew I was going to say that)…
Jisc Open Research Hub (ORH)
A few years ago Jisc seized upon the main pain point and set about solving the problem. We consulted far and wide in the university sector; assembled a crack team of developers, providers, specialists and pilots; and produced the Jisc Open Research Hub (which for a long time was known as the Research Data Shared Service).
What makes the Jisc service different?
It’s been designed from the ground up to make preservation as painless as possible for researchers. We’ve concentrated extensively on developing a compelling user experience using a user-centred-design approach with many, many rounds of user acceptance.
We’ve focussed, also, on making it talk to many other systems… Wedded to your own favourite repository but still want to preserve? No problem. We’ll plug in. Want to use your ORCiD? Need a DOI? We do that too. What about making the preservation system do it’s preservation thing? No problem. It all happens automatically. Minimum re-keying. Maximum preservation productivity. Deposit and ORH does the rest.
Come to talk to us about your preservation needs.
