Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

DataCite, re3data.org, and Databib Announce Collaboration

March 25th, 2014

Databib (http://databib.org) is a tool for helping researchers identify and locate online repositories of research data that has been online since April 2012. It was initially developed by Purdue University under the leadership of Professor Michael Witt, Libraries, Head of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2), in collaboration with Penn State University and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the United States. Its international, multidisciplinary editorial board identifies, catalogs, and curates a searchable index of research data repositories.

The aim of this merger is to reduce duplication of effort and to better serve the research community with a single, sustainable registry of research data repositories that incorporates the best features of both projects.

re3data.org and Databib have agreed to the following five principles for successful cooperation:

1.    Openness: the metadata and the interfaces of the joint registry will be openly accessible. Metadata records will be made accessible under terms of the Creative Commons CC0 protocol;

2.    Optimal quality assurance: a two-stage workflow, with a first review of submissions by an international editorial board plus a second one for consistency, will guarantee the quality and currency of records;

3.    Development of innovative functionalities: cooperative development of new functionality for the joint registry and further integration with a global ecosystem of infrastructures that meet the needs of data-driven research and open science;

4.    Shared leadership: the joint registry will be lead by two representatives (one from each project) as equal partners;

5.    Sustainability: both projects will work together on a sustainable governance structure and a permanent infrastructure for the joint registry.

The joint registry will be operated under the name “re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories” with its editorial board retaining the name of Databib. Both registries have posted a Memorandum of Understanding on their respective websites and have exchanged metadata records in advance of fully merging their platforms and processes. By the end of 2015, the merged registry will become an imprint of DataCite and be included in its suite of services.

March 25, 2014

Dublin, Ireland; Karlsruhe, Germany; and West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

More Information:

Databib (http://databib.org) is a tool for helping researchers identify and locate online repositories of research data that has been online since April 2012. It was initially developed by Purdue University in collaboration with Penn State University and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the United States. Its international, multidisciplinary editorial board identifies, catalogs, and curates a searchable index of research data repositories.

Since early 2012, “re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories” (http://re3data.org) has been indexing research data repositories. Project partners in re3data.org are the Library and Information Services department (LIS) of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the Computer and Media Service at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the KIT Library at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). re3data.org is funded from 2012 to 2015 by the German Research Foundation DFG.

DataCite (http://datacite.org) is a not-for-profit organization formed in London on December 1, 2009, with an aim to establish easier access to research data on the Internet, increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly record, and support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. To date, it has registered over 3 million datasets with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).