Moving Data around: Integrated Research Workflows for Curating and Publishing Data

The presentation draws on a use case from political science to demonstrate integrated scholarly processes for curating and publishing data. Curation activities are distributed across institutional and national repositories, archives, registries and websites. In workflows which prioritise existing research practice and disciplinary standards, researchers provide structured metadata to the Australian Data Archive (ADA) using a template based on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). These metadata are mapped to RDF and RIF-CS standards and sent to the institutional repository at UNSW Australia, for publication and further dissemination. The primary role of the institutional repository is to move the data around – to apply standards and protocols that enable the data to be widely and openly accessible.The implementation supports researchers in comprehensively describing their research methods and data according to a widely-adopted disciplinary standard, and reduces their workload relating to institutional reporting and dissemination. The integrity of the institutional data repository is increased by its direct integration with the rich descriptions of data in the disciplinary archive. Added value for the institution is derived from the reporting capabilities of the repository, which links to enterprise systems to generate statistics about the University's research assets.