A decentralized high-intensity approach to foster data management best practices and publication of open research data

Even though many researchers are aware of the popularity of Open Science best practices with
funders and with the scientic community in general, the fraction of research data that is brought
into shape for future re-use and openly shared is still disappointingly low. Recent surveys indicate
that providing suitable infrastructure, information about available infrastructure and basic support
within the realm of research data management (RDM) could be among the most eective measures
to remedy this situation (Goben & Grin, 2019; von der Heyde, 2019; Kim, 2017).

We hypothesize that small-scale distributed data repositories together with support and training oers
at the institutional or departmental level are necessary to initiate a cultural change that will result in
a wide adoption of sharing and re-using research data. Furthermore, by integrating the technical
system into the local IT infrastructure and by providing RDM support and technical expertise close
to the researchers, many advantages over larger systems run in remote locations can be realized.
We present a simple solution for an institutional or departmental research data archival and publishing
system. It is built from o-the-shelf open source components but highly customizable. We show the
system in use at our institution and how the workload required by researchers to submit their research
data for archival and publication can be minimized through suitable adaptions. We demonstrate that
such a local repository, which adheres to the FAIR principles, serves to generate exposure for research
data as well as much larger nation-scale general data repositories or global scale discipline-specic
ones.