1.
Policies, procedures and
standards for managing content
in repositories
COAR Research Data Management Workshop
16 May, 2018
Hamburg
Robin Rice, University of Edinburgh

2.
Theory and practice
Green, A., Macdonald, S. and R. Rice,
(2009). Policy-making for Research Data
in Repositories: A Guide
https://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk

3.
3
Policies for research data in IRs
• Eligible depositors
• Access and re-use
• Data quality requirements
• Metadata
• Confidentiality and disclosure
• Rights and ownership
• Data file formats

4.
4
Deposits
• Who is eligible to deposit data in the archive? (all staff? postgraduate
students? others?)
• Will there be assisted deposit? (by whom?)
• Moderation by repository staff?
• What kind of data will be received? …

5.
5
… What kind of data?
• Scientific experiments
• Models and simulations
• Observations (surveys, censuses, voting records, field recordings)
• Derived data: resulting from processing or combining ‘raw’ or other
data
• Multimedia: video recordings, images, sound
• Data underlying results in published papers only?
• Software code?

6.
6
Access and reuse
• Will access to the content in the repository be open to
the public?
• Will registration be compulsory before downloading or
accessing data?
• How will restricted access conditions be implemented?
Will there be an embargo option?
• Will the archive or the depositor attach a license for
re-use? (such as an open data license)
• Will a sample citation be provided for the dataset?

7.
7
Data quality requirements
• What criteria do the data need to meet in terms of
quality? (FAIR)
• Is the coverage complete?
• Have they been checked for validity?
• Is there sufficient metadata / documentation?
• Who is responsible for checking?

8.
8
Confidentiality and disclosure
• What requirements must data creators meet
regarding sensitive data? (Is this made explicit?)
• Is personally identifying information allowed?
• Who will anonymise the data?
• If data is not fully anonymised, have the subjects
given informed consent for releasing the data?
• Is this checked?

9.
9
Rights and ownership
• What rights relating to the data are retained by the
creator?
• What rights are transferred to the archive?
• May the archive change the data at all (for example,
during processing data for preservation)?
• Does the creator confirm that the data do not infringe
the copyright of others, or certify that permission
from the rights-owner has been received?

10.
10
Data file formats
• Which formats will be accepted for deposit?
• Which formats are preferred?
• Will the formats be normalised by the archive?
• Will compression formats (for example, zipped files)
be accepted?
• Will the archive retain the original bit stream as well
as the normalised files?
• Is there a limit to the size and number of files the
archive will accept?

11.
Preservation
• How long will data be kept?
• Will fixity information be stored on ingest (checksums)?
• Will provenance information be stored (audit trail, who changed files,
metadata)?
• What preservation planning will be done?
• What is the exit strategy for the repository itself?

12.
Standards that may be relevant –
which will you use, if any?
• Core Seal Trust
• FAIR
• DataCite
• Dublin Core, DC terms
• METS
• PREMIS
• Discipline-specific standards?

13.
In practice… Edinburgh DataShare as example
• https://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk/ home page: browse or deposit
• https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-
data-service/sharing-preserving-data/data-repository - documentation
home page
• https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-
data-service/sharing-preserving-data/data-repository/service-policies -
policies page
• https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/DataShare DataShare wiki
page – procedures, etc.
• http://www.opendoar.org/tools/en/policies.php - OpenDOAR policies tool