Metadata Recommendations for Repository Adoption from the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative
GREI repositories collaborate to recommend metadata standards to support NIH’s data management and sharing policy and ensure FAIR metadata for data sharing, discovery, and reuse.
Common Metadata Recommendations
Having consistent metadata fields and vocabularies in use across the generalist repositories is key to achieving the GREI goal of enhancing support for NIH data sharing, discovery, and reuse. As part of the GREI objective to “adopt consistent metadata models”, the GREI repositories — Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo, with invaluable input from DataCite — have collaborated on a set of metadata recommendations that strongly encourage repositories to collect specific metadata when researchers publish their research outputs, including data from NIH-funded projects. The repositories have based these recommendations on properties from the DataCite Metadata Schema (v4.4) in an effort to enhance compatibility between repository metadata and persistent identifier (PID) metadata.
GREI repositories will use this set of recommendations to increase the alignment of their metadata schemas, a key GREI objective supporting both data sharing and discovery across the generalist repositories. The GREI repositories also hope that these recommendations help other repositories, such as discipline-specific repositories and institutional repositories, align their metadata for cohesive data sharing and discovery across the data repository ecosystem.
About GREI
The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) is a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) program sponsored by the Office of Data Science Strategy that has brought together seven generalist repositories to collaborate on establishing “a common set of cohesive and consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure” and increasing awareness and adoption of the FAIR principles.
Learn more and share your thoughts during a GREI Collaborative Webinar
If you would like to learn more and share feedback on the recommendations, join the GREI Collaborative Webinar: Metadata and Community Feedback on September 15th at 2pm US EDT. During the webinar, members of the GREI Metadata and Search subcommittee will discuss how the recommendations have evolved so far and you’ll be able to share your thoughts and feedback.you can also provide inputs via the GREI Google Group. Based on the feedback — and on evolving metadata best practices, such as updates to the DataCite Metadata Schema, new ontologies, and PID standards — the group aims to publish updates to these recommendations. Registration for the free webinar at:
Authors:
Julian Gautier, Dataverse, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9229-5317
David Scherer, Mendeley, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6244-4331
Julie Wood, Vivli, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9506-1847
Kelly Stathis, DataCite https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6133-4045
Sara Gonzales, Zenodo, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1193-2298
Ana Van Gulick, Figshare https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8133-6395
John Chodacki, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7378-2408
Keywords: generalist repositories, metadata, National Institutes of Health (NIH), FAIR, data sharing, data discovery, GREI
