Kicking Off GREI’s Third Year
GREI’s Accomplishments in Year 2
The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) made significant progress in its second year, with a focus on defining common repository functionalities for search and browse capabilities, determining and beginning implementation of consistent metadata standards across repositories, publishing a catalog of use cases for data sharing and discovery, and establishing standardized metrics for tracking data usage and citations. The GREI coopetition working group also prioritized community engagement activities in year two, including hosting webinars, publishing blogs, and presenting at conferences to share the initiative’s work and gathering community feedback.
Some of the collaborative work undertaken in the past year includes: coordinating the implementation of Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers, developing a guide for selecting a generalist repository, and collaborating on standardizing data citation practices. The initiative continues to foster a collaborative and evolving “coopetition” spirit as it works on delivering concrete outputs to support enhanced data sharing and discovery across repositories.
New Coopetition Leaders for Year 3
Leadership of the GREI coopetition changes each year with rotating co-chairs from each GREI repository. The year two co-chairs, Ana Van Gulick (Figshare) and John Chodacki (Dryad / California Digital Library), passed the torch to the year three co-chairs in March 2024. In year three, Sonia Barbosa (Harvard Dataverse), Kristi Holmes (Zenodo / Northwestern University), and Traci Snowden (Mendeley Data / Elsevier) respectively, have taken the helm. The co-chairs are responsible for providing strategic guidance, organizing meetings to foster collaboration and progress within the initiative, and facilitating execution of a plan for GREI coopetition work each year. See press releases from Elsevier (April 3, 2024) and Northwestern (April 18, 2024) for more.
GREI Plans for Year 3
As year three gets underway, the GREI repositories will continue to work together to make NIH-funded research data more accessible, reusable, and trackable by developing best practices and standards for generalist repositories. Highlights of the work planned for GREI year three include:
- Updating and improving the generalist repository comparison chart (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7946938)
- Advancing consistent metadata through the ongoing implementation of and revisions to the GREI metadata recommendation (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8101957)
- Developing recommendations for enabling cross-repository search
- Strengthening analytics and reporting capabilities by establishing consistent metrics for NIH-funded data across GREI repositories, and leveraging the DataCite usage tracker
- Documenting additional generalist repository use cases
- Community engagement efforts including developing new training resources and outreach materials for researchers and gathering feedback from researcher and librarian communities
- Collaborating with other communities(e.g., FASEB, U.S. Repository Network, The Carpentries)
This work supports the key focus of GREI, which is to enhance the discoverability and usability of shared scientific data across disciplines through the coordinated efforts of diverse stakeholders in the research community. More broadly, the ongoing work of GREI contributes to the larger goals of open science, which emphasize collaboration, data sharing, and research reproducibility as integral to scientific advancement and societal impact.
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
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.
Author
Lisa Curtin, Figshare, 0000–0003–1137–7789
