This year’s Open Repositories conference was, again, a virtual affair. Hosted by the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, the event brought together an audience of repository managers, data curators, developers, and research governance officers from around the world—all with a shared enthusiasm and firm belief in the power of open, accessible, and easily shareable research.
One of our top application engineers, Taylor Mudd, shared three presentations, diving into the gritty details of Data Management Plans, the benefits of migrating a repository, and achieving compliance without complaints.
The changing role of repository Data Management Plans from necessary evil to vital component
Data Management Plans (DMPs) are often required to be submitted alongside ethical approval and funding applications for research projects. They’re a time-consuming requirement, often managed in separate systems and stored in unstructured formats. Typically, they’re completed at the start of a research project and then ignored until the project ends.
However, recording a DMP in a structured “machine-actionable” format has significant benefits:
- Improves researcher compliance
- Minimizes administrative burden
- Ensures easier data tracking and reporting
“The idea is to make it easy for researchers to create and update DMPs and see them as an integral part of their research with significant benefits,” said Taylor.
Discovery after repository migration—or how to achieve a 285% increase in downloads!
“We know that migrating decades of data is a daunting prospect in itself, let alone dealing with any repercussions in terms of discoverability and search engine rankings,” said Taylor. “That’s why I focused my second conference presentation on the ways in which a modern repository can increase search engine discoverability, with improved user experience and even credibility.”
Taylor discussed approaches to improving discoverability and traffic, including:
- Updating repository registry services
- Registering sites with Google Webmaster and Google Scholar
- Using more HTML <meta> tags than usual for better indexing by web crawlers
The benefits of a successful migration are considerable. One client averaged just over 2500 downloads a month pre-migration, and achieved an impressive 285% increase post-migration with over 9700 average downloads!
Compliance without complaint
It’s long been a challenge for researchers to comply with countless conflicting funder policies, along with convoluted and time-consuming repository submission processes. In his third presentation, Taylor shared how Cayuse Repository makes it easier for researchers to comply, and easier for repository managers to ensure compliance.
“The Repository development team accomplished this by working with repository managers and researchers from the University of Westminster,” said Taylor. “The result of redesigning the submission process and researcher interface was a process that makes compliance easy, appealing, and–perhaps, most importantly–achievable without any additional effort on behalf of researchers.
Cayuse Repository streamlines processes and drives engagement
Taylor is part of the top notch engineering team behind Cayuse Repository and its key features:
- A single repository for all research, enabling research outputs related to a project to be stored together and searched simultaneously.
- An extensive API for publishing and receiving machine-readable structured data in open formats, as well as standards-based API. Our carefully designed APIs make it easy to support custom integrations.
- Highly secure with easy-to-use access request workflows, so that restricted files can be managed with confidence.
Learn more about Cayuse Repository
- Get a look at Repository’s features and benefits and watch a demo
- Find out how Australian Catholic University used Repository to streamline processes and increase researcher engagement
