Introducing the Jisc Open Research Hub

The poster introduces Jisc’s Open Research Hub. This is a cloud-based service providing a community governed, national solution for universities and other research institutions to manage, store, preserve and share their published research data.  

Research institutions now operate in an environment which requires them to address research data management and the wider ‘open research’ agenda.  Institutions must respond to mandates from publishers and research funders, as well as ensure of the security of their sensitive data and the prestige of both the institution and their researchers. Given these issues, it’s important that universities can effectively oversee and manage their digital research outputs.   

Our service was developed following a consultation with the UK research sector which showed a clear demand for a national shared service. The potential economies of scale of a national service, as well a perceived lack of expertise in some smaller institutions to tackle this issue, were both important factors.  

Requirements were gathered from over 70 UK universities and other sector bodies. As well as economies of scale, potential users were looking for a multi-content type solution, with enhanced user experience, digital preservation, ease of reporting and community oversight. They were also keen for any service to interoperate easily with other institutional systems and scholarly communications platforms. 

In response to these requirements, we have built a modular and interoperable service, offering a repository, preservation systems, reporting and long-term storage. The repository is multi-tenanted, offering significant cost savings, and allows the deposit of any content type.  Based on existing open standards, the service’s open data model incorporates best practice from across the sector, including DataCite, CrossRef, CERIF, Dublin Core and PREMIS.  This means the Hub can handle more than just research data, opening up many possibilities for use in supporting the open research agenda.