eDissPlus

Abstract

For researchers and scientific institutions the significance of digital research data as well as their storage and publication increases permanently. Using IT-based technologies improves the generation, processing and distribution of data in the context of research projects significantly. The archiving, publication and reusability of research data contribute significantly to the research activities and lead to a greater acceptance and an increase in the reputations for researchers.

Doctoral students belong to the young scientists at universities, which generate an increasing amount of research data in their own research projects. To date, there is no explicit requirement for doctoral students at German universities to archive the research data generated during their doctoral project or to publish them as part of their dissertation. However, the principles of good scientific practice also apply to them, as the Dissertation’s are explicitly an independent scientific achievement of the doctoral students.

Services are required to support a professional research data management for doctoral students. On the one hand there should be technical support, i.e. software tools and their integration into the university infrastructure and environment that helps doctoral students immediately with the management of their research data, ie the administration, selection, description and storage of research data. On the other hand advisory services have to be implemented that meets the actual needs of the doctoral students, for example help on choosing an appropriate metadata schema for describing or for the selection of a suitable research data repository for archiving. In addition, many legal issues in dealing with research data are still open, which often prevents researchers from research data publications.

The presentation for the ETD 2018 will cover a short introduction of the project eDissPlus and its goals from the Humboldt-University and the German National Library. The focus will be on the results and lessons learned through the project, which ends in 2018. The presentation will show the workflow of publishing the thesis and corresponding research data on the institutional repository of the Humboldt Universität and the delivery of these publications to the German National Library.

To achieve this we had to alter our ingest workflow of the Dspace Repository and extend the XML-Metadata-Schema (xMetaDissPlus) used by the National Library for the OAI-Harvesting of thesis from institutional repositories of German Universities. We introduced the possibility of giving relations in the metadata, which points from the thesis to the research data and via versa.

Surprisingly our researchers quickly adapted the new possibility and used the relations in the metadata to reference their articles in a cumulative thesis, a special form of thesis, which is used more and more at our University. Other researchers used the relation metadata fields to reference other publications, some even tried to describe their whole reference list. However, another conclusion from our project is that the legal questions and uncertainties for the researchers in many cases prohibit the publication of research data.