Community Feedback Shapes the Future of Generalist Repositories: Insights from GREI Community Calls

In the spring of 2024, the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) hosted a series of community calls with the purpose of gaining feedback from researchers, librarians, and NIH domain repository representatives on the Generalist Repository Comparison Chart and GREI Metadata Recommendations.

Vote by kliwir art from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

Grounded in our commitment to enhancing clarity and transparency, these community calls provided the opportunity to gain valuable insight into how we can better support researchers who need to find the most appropriate generalist repository for their data needs. The calls also facilitated engagement with our community on how our adoption of consistent metadata guidance and best practices across the generalist repositories could further enhance interoperability and data discoverability.

In this first round of community calls, we had 51 participants including researchers, librarians, and NIH domain repository representatives. Their feedback defined the current state of their unique repository landscape and identified key insights into how the GREI coopetition can better reduce barriers to data sharing.

The Researcher’s Landscape

• All the researcher respondents have published their work in a repository, and they all have used repositories to find and/or reuse data from other researchers.
• Most had not previously used the GREI repository comparison chart, but more than half of them think it can be useful for repository discovery and decision-making.
• All researchers are well-informed on their fields’ accepted metadata standards, though many of them would like more types of scholarly works — beyond journal publications — represented in the metadata fields.

Opportunity: As subject-matter experts, researchers can benefit from guidance in selecting appropriate repositories that meet federal or journal requirements for sharing data. This presents an opportunity for support from their librarians and repository representatives.

The Librarian’s Landscape

• About half of the librarian respondents used the comparison chart to learn about generalist repositories or help their researchers find appropriate repositories.
• About half of the librarians find the comparison chart too dense and suggest a shorter version that emphasizes the useful features of the repository options.
• Most librarians were not familiar with the GREI metadata standards.

Opportunity: Librarians are critical partners of researchers and are often called upon to support them in finding the appropriate repository. This presents an opportunity to empower the librarian community for their expertise and provide additional resources to promote the value of metadata to enhance discoverability.

The NIH Domain Repository Representative’s Landscape

• All the NIH domain repository representatives have used the comparison chart to learn more about generalist repository options.
• Half of the NIH domain repository representatives have been asked to assist users in uploading data to a generalist repository.
• All respondents were familiar with GREI common metadata recommendations.

Opportunity: NIH Domain Repository Representatives offered a distinct perspective since they are familiar with the common metadata recommendations. This presents an opportunity to provide additional spaces for NIH Domain Repository Representatives to offer specific metadata feedback as respondents suggested that dates needed to be included in the metadata.

The Generalist Repository Landscape: Framing the Big Picture

While the GREI community calls gave us the opportunity to distinguish the specific needs of all three of our participant groups, we were also able to gather data on the generalist repository landscape overall to better inform our next steps and highlight priority areas.

Most Valued Characteristics

All participants were asked to rank the characteristics they value most in the generalist repository comparison chart and metadata recommendations. The top three generalist repository comparison chart characteristics identified were:

1. Support linking to related publications
2. Support metadata schemas
3. Costs to the researcher

Additionally, we noted that participants identified 1) Data format, 2) Supporting linking related to publications, and 3) Support for grant id(s) as the top three most essential metadata characteristics.

Expansion Criteria

Participants of these community calls suggested that the repository comparison chart could be improved by providing more detail and expanding on the following criteria: Repository storage limits, describing how human subjects data are handled, outlining the data retention policy and length, indicating if data transfer to the repository is supported, and linking to training resources.

Key Suggestions and Recommendations

1. Richer Metadata: For repositories to have richer metadata, the participants recommended offering fields for geographic coverage, dates, and metadata regarding accessibility and/or its limitations (the extent to which the datasets can be easily used by individuals using assistive technologies). These suggestions will enable more robust metadata collection to enhance research discoverability.
2. Reference Tool: The participants emphasized that an additional version of the repository comparison chart which includes a decision tree for repository selection is needed as a simpler easy-to-follow tool to guide decisions on the best repository for the user.

What’s Next for the GREI Repositories?

The feedback received from these community calls has informed new versions of the Generalist Repository Chart and GREI Metadata Recommendations that most GREI repositories have implemented or have plans to implement. The generalist repositories have also published the Generalist Repository Selection Flow Chart, a quick reference designed to facilitate the selection of a generalist repository alongside the existing comparison chart.

We are committed to continuous improvement and the further development of these resources to best support data sharing and reproducibility. Driven by collaborative coopetition, GREI relies on community feedback to achieve its goals and is looking forward to round 2 of our community call series. Hope to see you there!

About GREI

The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) is a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative which has brought seven generalist repositories together into a collaborative working group focused on establishing “a common set of cohesive and consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure” to enhance NIH data sharing and reuse and increasing awareness and adoption of the FAIR principles.

Engage with the GREI Community

The GREI Community Feedback Form is one easy way to engage with the generalist repositories. Please join the GREI Google Group to receive updates on GREI activities and events, as well as the latest posts on the GREI blog. All GREI resources including recordings and slides from past events and guides are publicly available in the GREI Community on Zenodo. Check out the GREI Training & Outreach Calendar for information on upcoming training events.

Authors

• Pearl Go, Northwestern University on behalf of Zenodo, 0000-0003-0533-1864
• Julie Goldman, Harvard Library on behalf of Harvard Dataverse, 0000-0001-8037-0623
• Sara Gonzales, Northwestern University on behalf of Zenodo, 0000-0002-1193-2298
• Nici Pfeiffer, OSF, 0000-0001-8335-6018
• David Scherer, Mendeley Data, 0000-0002-6244-4331

Keywords: generalist repositories, National Institutes of Health (NIH), data sharing, data discovery, #nihdata, #grei, data reuse, data storage, generalist repositories, repository selection, metadata, interoperability, community feedback