Data Search
Registers of Repositories
A register of repositories is a database of trusted open repositories that serves two purposes:
- Researchers can find repositories where they can upload their own research data for long-term storage.
- Anyone interested in research data (researchers, citizen scientists, politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs) can find, download and reuse the data.
Register is actually a catalogue of metadata about repositories.
Repositories are characterized by the following metadata:
- the web address of the repository
- the existence of a repository policy
- type of repository (universal, institutional, disciplinary)
- main data types
- list of subject areas
- open or closed
- persistent identifiers used
- licenses used
- software
- country
- managing institution
- year of establishment
- quality certificate
- compatibility with the OAI-PMH protocol
- etc.
When starting a dataset search in the register of repositories, you need to search by a rather wide subject field, find a data repository of interest to you and continue the search inside the selected repository.
Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data)
re3data.org is the global register of open research data repositories.
More than 2,600 repositories have so far been registered since 2012.
The registry offers 41 filters to refine your search. However, it should be noted that filtering does not always give good results, as the repository manager has not provided very comprehensive metadata.
A clear system of icons helps you understand:
- whether the repository is open or closed
- information about licenses
- which persistent identifier is used (DOI, hdl, purl, etc.)
- whether the repository has a certificate, etc.
We do an example search to find repositories for materials science:
We start the search with the keyword materials science. This search returns 80 results (26.09.2019) and can be quickly reviewed based on the descriptions of the repositories. Once we have selected the one of interest, we will perform further searches inside the selected repository. (The video is in Estonian, but still helpful).
Next example is about social science repositories with the keyword social science and we get 337 results (20.09.2019). Among the results, we choose the Finnish Social Science Data Archive, which takes us to the Finnish data portal Aila:
Re3data also offers a visually attractive search by subject, Browse by subject, but there is a risk that you will not find repositories in a field which is too narrow.
OpenDOAR
Another place to find open research data is OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories), which allows you to search for publications, software, patents, reports and conference proceedings in addition to the data. It is recommended to use the advanced search to find the repository that best meets your needs.
However, the graph shows that there are not so many datasets in the OpenDOAR registry compared to other data types:
https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/view/repository_visualisations/1.html