Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• How does proper online archival of research inputs and products matter for reproducible science, and why might lab websites not be enough?

Objectives

• Define and describe the importance of archiving research inputs and outputs.

• Select appropriate archival services for different types of research objects.

• Define benefits of acquiring globally unique resolvable identifiers for digital resarch objects archived online.

Archival of Research Products

In this lesson we will learn about why appropriate online archival of digital research inputs and outputs is an important part of promoting reproducibility. Specifically, research inputs such as data, source code, and notebooks that become digitally unavailable or inaccessible due to insufficient archiving for perpetuity are a major impediment to reproducibility.

Learning objectives

• Define and describe the importance of archiving research inputs and outputs.
• Select appropriate archival services for different types of research objects.
• Define benefits of acquiring globally unique resolvable identifiers for digital resarch objects archived online.

Online archiving of digital research inputs and products

Why archives for research inputs and products, and why use them

A not so uncommon story: You’re a graduate student reading a paper on which you want to base your analysis approach, and for you therefore need to verify and reproduce the analysis. The paper gives the lab’s website as the link for obtaining the code. However, it turns out the researcher has since left that university, and their new lab’s website no longer has a link to that code. You contact the author directly to ask about the code that the paper claims to be available from the lab website. After several weeks of silence the author responds that they will try and find the code, but they’re working on a different project now. That was a month ago.

Lab websites aren’t archives. Doing online archiving well is non-trivial, and likely isn’t your line of research. Use an online archive that specializes in doing well what you need from an archive.

Journal supplemental materials are popular for digital archiving (they are typically free for the author) but often suffer from a number deficiencies when compared to a bona-fide online archive:

• Impoverished or lack of independent indexing for findability
• Paywalled if the article is paywalled
• Lack of direct download link
• Only manuscript-oriented formats supported (PDF, MS Word)
• No separate citation and unique identifier

There are many archives, for all imaginable purposes and domains. In fact, there are so many that there is re3data, a registry of currently >2000 repositories that allows browsing them by various attributes.

Exercise 1

• Identify requirements and desirable features for an archive for a non-manuscript research product of your choice. Compare to lab website archiving and journal supplemental materials.

Exercise 2

Identify the research products that underly and support a manuscript of yours in preparation (or one recently published if those research products became supplementary materials or were not published). Consider the following choices of repositories for fit for purpose:

• Dryad
• Zenodo
• Harvard Dataverse
• Figshare
• Journal of Open Source Software
• Your university’s Institutional Repository (IR)
• A public source code repository (Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab etc)

Explain your preferences, and compare to lab website and supplemental material archiving.

Stable, globally unique, and resolvable identifiers for research products

Why globally unique resolvable identifiers for non-paper research products?

One of the key benefits of using an archive is that nearly all of them will assign a globally unique resolvable identifier to deposits. Deposit identifiers benefit both depositors, and those reusing deposits, i.e., all of an archive’s primary users:

• Identify and cite the deposit in a manuscript and a CV
• Track views, downloads, or more generally impact
• Identify exactly what record, and which version of it was (re)used

Why DOIs

DOIs (digital object identifiers) are only one type of unique identifier, but is the most frequently used type in scholarly communication, and for identifying research products. Some of its benefits include:

• Allows separating content from who hosts the content.
• Cannot be minted ad-hoc, and instead requires interacting with a registration agency, which typically need to be paid a fee. This fosters metadata quality, and assigns clear responsibility for maintaining the DOI’s continued resolution.
• Publishers, and the publishing industry, knows how to deal with them.
• Practically every scholar knows how to deal with them.

CrossRef versus DataCite

While DOIs on the surface all look the same, some expectations for their associated metadata (and programmable APIs differ based on the issuing DOI registrar (often referred to as “type of DOI”). In scholarly publishing and communication, the most frequently encountered DOI registrars are CrossRef (issues almost all scientific paper DOIs, works with publishers) and DataCite. The latter is used for all kinds of “other” research products, including data, software, source code, and preprints.

Key Points

• Research inputs such as data, source code, and notebooks that become digitally unavailable or inaccessible due to insufficient archiving for perpetuity are a major impediment to reproducibility.