Dalhousie University, along with a number of members of the Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL) and other universities across Canada, has entered in to a Service Agreement with the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) to host an institutional Dataverse on the Scholars Portal Dataverse. Dataverse is an open-source web application used to deposit, share and cite research data. It was developed by the Institution for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Why deposit data in Dataverse?

There are many benefits for a researcher to depositing data in the Dataverse repository. Research Data Management Librarian Erin MacPherson suggests that Dataverse can help you to effectively manage your data and save time. “There are useful features such as the ability to assign roles and permissions and licenses. Publishing your data in a data repository helps to meet emerging grant and funding requirements. Finally, publishing your data can help increase research visibility,” observes MacPherson.

Benefits of an Institutional Repository for Dalhousie University on Scholars Portal Dataverse

Dean of Libraries Donna Bourne-Tyson notes, “One of the biggest benefits with having an Institutional Dataverse on the SP Dataverse is that we are contributing to the effort for a robust national data repository. We already have a strong collective effort to develop research data management tools and resources through the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ Portage Network, and this will further assist these endeavors.”

Some of the other benefits include:

• Institutional Dataverses (Dalhousie has its own Institutional Dataverse on the site).
• Canadian data hosting
• Powerful visualization tools
• Persistent identifiers (DataCite Canada DOI minting)
• Open discovery on the web (Google SHARE and FRDR harvesting)
• Bilingual Interface (English and French)

What happens to the Dalhousie’s existing Dataverse?

The Dalhousie Libraries currently hosts a local instance of Dataverse; however, from this point onwards, all new datasets and users will be directed to use Dalhousie’s institutional Dataverse hosted on the Scholars Portal Dataverse site. Over the coming year, the data management team will be in touch with existing users about migrating their data to the Dalhousie Institutional repository hosted on Scholars Portal Dataverse site. A decision will be made about maintaining a locally hosted instance at the end of the year.

Want to learn more?

If you are interested in using Dataverse to publish your data or would like a demonstration, please contact data.management@dal.ca and have a look at some of our training materials:

• Explore Dataverse website: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/
• Scholars Portal Dataverse FAQ: https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/
• Dataverse User Guide: https://learn.scholarsportal.info/all-guides/dataverse/