In the research world, data sharing is more important than ever. With more data created daily, it gets harder to find—information is scattered everywhere, instead of being in one place. UBC’s primary research data repository is located at Scholars Portal Dataverse. While it contains a large portion of UBC’s research data output, it doesn’t capture it all.
The Dryad data repository is also popular with both researchers and publishers, especially in the life sciences, and UBC has just entered into an institutional partnership that will allow researchers to deposit data into the Dryad data repository at no charge.
However, Scholars Portal Dataverse and Dryad aren’t connected. So, a search in UBC’s primary data repository would miss a large portion of UBC’s data, until now.
UBC Library’s Research Commons’ new software pipeline, dryad2dataverse, solves this problem, making UBC’s data collection more consolidated, findable, and user-friendly.
At its simplest, dryad2dataverse, developed by our multi-talented Paul Lesack, is a standalone program that automatically copies data from Dryad into Dataverse. This means that much of UBC’s research holdings are now available in one place: Scholars Portal Dataverse. Therefore, anything deposited into Dryad benefits from Scholars Portal’s large number of connections, such as being findable in UBC Library’s Summon Catalogue, UBC’s Open Collections, and Canada’s Federated Research Data Repository’s (FRDR) national-research data-search tools. This includes geospatial searches using Geodisy, the geospatial data-search tool, also developed at the Research Commons.
Most importantly, this requires no effort from researchers who have deposited information into Dryad, making the institutional partnership more valuable.
But, dryad2dataverse is more than a simple pipeline from one website to another; it also includes a software toolkit, which Python programmers can use in their own software. Using the software toolkit, researchers, librarians, or others using Dataverse or Dryad can:
- Easily create Dataverse-compatible metadata from Dryad
- Automatically transfer files
- Monitor changes over time
dryad2dataverse works with any Dryad installation and any Dataverse installation. So, it can be used by libraries and researchers in Canada—or around the world—to connect to their local, regional, or national Dataverse repositories.
More information is available here: https://researchcommons.library.ubc.ca/projects/dryad2dataverse/.
Downloads are available here: https://ubc-library-rc.github.io/dryad2dataverse/.