From June 12 to 15, 2023, the annual Open Repositories Conference, opens an external URL in a new window was held under the theme "Repositories unlocked for discovery and interoperability". This time, the host was Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

In keeping with the title, the presentations focused on the latest developments in the eponymous research data and publication repositories about interoperability and sharing information. A central and recurring topic was the COAR Notify Protocol, opens an external URL in a new window, which forms the basis for exchanging information on events such as the publication of a new article between several repositories. Some well-known repositories already support the protocol in their more recent versions, while others are still working on incorporating this communication channel.

Among many other general developments, advances in well-known repository solutions such as Dataverse, DSpace, Fedora and EPrints were presented. A workshop was held on InvenioRDM, in which the system’s features and community were presented. Among other things, the system’s adaptability was demonstrated using the institutional repositories of TU Wien and Northwestern University.

But attention was not only paid to the already well-known top dogs. Newcomers such as DBRepo by Martin Weise (TU Wien) were also given a stage in front of an interested audience. DBRepo is a new type of database-based repository which, in contrast to traditional systems, copes well with continuously changing data sets and allows the evolution of data sets to be tracked via versioning.

David Eckhard (TU Graz) and Max Moser (TU Wien) also came up with an innovation, a prototypical integration between DAMAP-based tools for creating data management plans and institutional research data repositories. Since both tools have information about the planned creation of new datasets and the use of existing datasets, exchanging information between the systems can save researchers some effort.

Overall, the conference provided a fertile ground for exchanging ideas for improving the entire ecosystem around repositories, and we are already looking forward to the next Open Repositories conference in June 2024 in Gothenburg, Sweden!

Further Reading

The conference materials are freely available:

https://zenodo.org/communities/inveniordm-workshop-2023, opens an external URL in a new window

https://zenodo.org/communities/openrepos, opens an external URL in a new window

Contact

TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
Favoritenstraße 16 (top floor), 1040 Vienna

research.data@tuwien.ac.at

Twitter: @RDMTUWien