Conference Agenda

In an era marked by the accelerating pace of scholarly communication and data-driven research, Canadian libraries are spearheading collaborative scholarly communications infrastructure at the national level to support shared repositories and related services. This session aims to present an overview of the concerted efforts across Canadian institutions to enhance the accessibility and interoperability of institutional repository content, research data, and more.

The presentation will delve into the landscape of service development, with a focus on the coordination of infrastructure components such as Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR), the Borealis Dataverse service, and the most recent development of a shared national institutional repository service. Concrete examples and case studies will highlight the successful implementation of these services, offering valuable insights into the challenges faced, solutions devised, and lessons learned.

The significance of this collaboration extends beyond borders; the Canadian experience helps support a larger blueprint for global progress in scholarly communication and open science. By fostering dialogue on lessons learned through community building, and unveiling future roadmaps, the session underscores the key role played by our networks - operating at scale and investing in collaborative efforts to empower the international research community.

In 2024, Princeton University launched new data repository services with the Princeton Data Commons. It spanned many challenges, including departmental restructures, new staff, and support for an existing critical service in brittle legacy architecture while developing a better way to support research data.

Rather than replacing one monolithic system with another, we reimagined a decoupled ecosystem of softwares serving the needs of researchers at each stage of their work, from ingestion through publication. Taking advantage of the best tools for research data management such as description using DataCite and managing permanent identifiers with DOIs, it gave us the opportunity to revisit data previously stored in a system not designed for it, and to create better repository objects in a hands-on review process. However, this project also represented a shift in user workflows established for nearly a decade, and presented new work in terms of non-automated data migration from the legacy system to the new one, a worthwhile challenge but one not often taken on in projects such as this.

We will discuss challenges and opportunities that come with building a data repository during periods of intense change, plans for user training, and the bright future that Princeton Data Commons presents.

We report on our progress in developing an open repository facilitating the practices of FAIR data and reproducible research. We review our efforts in the areas of technical development, community outreach, and policy dialogue. We think our experience shall be helpful to others whose undertakings have also focused on building open repositories but are similarly constrained by resources.

The rapid development of new digital research practices has changed the ways of sharing scientific knowledge. This provides both new opportunities for sharing digital research artifacts as well as new challenges when it comes to complexity in the evolving digital landscape.

One key challenge is to enable sharing of digital research artifacts to promote research transparency for different research domains while still maintaining the legal and ethical responsibilities at the University level. Solving issues related to this key challenge requires both technical solutions as well as cultural change.

Our approach has been to work in parallel with setting-up a new digital repository while evolving a new data governance model in dialog with test-users. This dialog has also been helpful in gaining understanding on data stewardship practices and roles needed in different research communities in order to document, curate and maintain FAIR data over time. This approach also included established partnership with the InvenioRDM project to develop the open source framework used for the digital repository.

Conclusions will be presented more thoroughly during the presentation, but we see a cross-functional approach where people with different skills and experiences are engaged to contribute as necessary for enabling change to happen.