Generalist Repositories Support Use Cases for Researchers, Institutions, and Funders
The GREI repositories have published a catalog detailing how they support NIH use cases for data sharing and discovery
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” and increasing awareness and adoption of the FAIR principles.
NIH Researcher, Institution, and Funder Use Cases
As part of this effort, the GREI repositories — Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo — have published a catalog detailing how the repositories support each of the following NIH use cases for data sharing and discovery:
- As an NIH-funded researcher, I want to select a repository to share my data, so that I can comply with my data management and sharing plan and the conditions of my grant.
- As a researcher, I want to find research data of interest so that I can validate findings, reuse data, and build on work within my discipline.
- As an institution, I want to report on all datasets from my institution, so that I can ensure compliance with research data sharing and management plan commitments by our researchers.
- As a funder, I want to find datasets we have funded, so that I can report on compliance with policies, and track impact of research funding and usage of data.
Catalog of GREI Use Cases Provides Step-by-Step Workflows
We encourage you to explore the GREI Use Cases Catalog to learn more about how the GREI repositories can support the above data-sharing and reporting needs. Each entry in the use case catalog provides step-by-step example workflows demonstrating how each repository meets the needs of the given use case. The catalog is intended to illustrate how generalist repositories fit into the NIH data sharing landscape alongside discipline-specific repositories, giving examples of both the common and unique capabilities of the GREI repositories.
The use cases demonstrate how generalist repositories can be used by researchers to flexibly share datasets and other research outputs as well as find research data to reuse and build upon in their field. They also highlight the ways that published data can be tracked including by NIH funding source and institutional affiliation, facilitating measurement of the impact of this research data as it is reused and cited.
Over the next year, the repositories will continue to build out the collection of use cases in the catalog including both individual repository and cross-repository use cases as well as those highlighting specific examples of NIH data sharing or searching.
Join us for a GREI Collaborative Webinar
Learn more about GREI and the use cases catalog and share feedback with GREI! Please join the GREI Use Cases subcommittee chairs, Dr. Rebecca Li and Dr. Kristi Holmes for a GREI Collaborative Webinar: Use Cases in Generalist Repositories and Community Feedback on August 1st at 12 pm US EDT. Registration is free and open to all who are interested. We look forward to seeing you there.
Author: Lisa Curtin, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1137-7789
Keywords: generalist repositories, use cases, National Institutes of Health (NIH), FAIR, data sharing, data discovery, #nihdata, #grei
