Services

Several discipline-specific repositories are operated or supported at the University of Graz:

 

AUSSDA

The Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA) is a data infrastructure for the social sciences in Austria, operated by a consortium of Austrian universities (Vienna, Graz, Linz, Innsbruck). This consortium also represents Austria in the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC). The repository offers a range of research support services, as well as the archiving of data in standard disciplinary formats and support for their subsequent use. The repository was certified with the Core Trust Seal in 2020.

Links

 

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GAMS

The Humanities Asset Management System (GAMS) complies with OAIS guidelines and has been certified with the Core Trust Seal since 2019. It is used for the management, publication, and long-term archiving of digital data from disciplines in the humanities that are produced as part of research projects at and with the Center for Information Modeling. With GAMS, researchers, teachers, and students can add standards and metadata to their data, manage it, and publish it in a citable form.

 

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unipub

unipub is the open access publication server of the University of Graz, which is operated at the University Library. The repository contains the open access journals of the University of Graz, university publications, second publications of researchers, and digitized materials of the special collections and the university archives.

 

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WegenerNet

The data portal WegenerNet is operated by the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. Since 2007, high-resolution weather and climate data from the Feldbach and Jonsbachtal regions have been made available here for research purposes.

RDM Cycle Manage Store Preserve ©CC-BY-SA, Helmut W. Klug - Remix of image by Gaelen Pinnock.

Help and training

A research data repository is a digital platform used to store, organize, and make accessible research data. These data should be archived for the long term (or for at least 10 years). Repositories can be characterized in different ways: Generally, a distinction is made between discipline-specific, institutional, and general repositories – but the boundaries cannot be clearly drawn here. Discipline-specific repositories only contain research data from clearly defined research areas. This has the great advantage that the data reaches the intended target group – i.e., your colleagues – in the fastest possible way. AUSSDA (social sciences), GAMS (humanities), or OpenNEURO (archive for neuroimaging data), for example, have a varying but limited focus on specific disciplines. Institutional repositories are tied to a specific institution (e.g., a research institution or university) and only archive data that originated at that institution; examples would be PHAIDRA of the University of Vienna or the repository of the Graz University of Technology. General, or catch-all repositories do not restrict the data that can be archived and are generally open to all forms of research data; an example would be Zenodo, which is operated at Cern.

When searching for a suitable repository for one's own research data, different paths can be followed, especially if you have no recent experience from your own research and publication activities: publishers or funding organizations often specify preferred repositories, or they refer to repository catalogs, such as re3data.org and fairsharing.org. The latter provide extensive information and search parameters on repositories. So, if the repositories to be used are not clearly specified, one should first select repositories that are known and recognized in one's own discipline, or that represent it well, before depositing data in institutional or general repositories. It is a sign of quality if a repository is certified according to certain criteria (Core Trust Seal, Nestor, ISO). The catalogs mentioned above offer extensive metadata for searching. Once the list of suitable repositories has been narrowed down, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with the terms of use and all other policies of the repositories. Only then you will be able to decide which one fulfills all the requirements needed for archiving your research data.

 

Literature

RDM Cycle Manage Store Preserve ©CC-BY-SA, Helmut W. Klug - Remix of image by Gaelen Pinnock.