IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2011   5

IASSIST Quarterly

Editor’s notes

Depositing data and placing it on the market
This issue (volume 35-4, 2011) of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ) 
is the last of the 2011 volume. Many IASSIST members 
are now getting ready and looking forward to this year’s 
conference. Probably it will turn out to be “the best ever!” 
and with interesting papers for the coming issues of the 
IQ. 

This issue focuses on aspects of the depositing of data, the 
guidelines, regulations and formalities involved, and also 
on the connections between the deposit and the re-use 
of data. 

The paper entitled “Examination of Data Deposit Practices 
in Repositories with the OAIS Model: Social Science 
Context” is written by Ayoung Yoon and Helen Tibbo 
from the School of Information and Library Science at 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The paper 
examines the requirements for depositing data in selected 
data repositories by analyzing the forms and guidelines 
for such deposits. The Open Archival Information System 
(OAIS) - an ISO standard - is used as a framework for this 
examination. The authors emphasize and reference 
others in arguing how “research data need to be 
available for use beyond the purposes for which they 
were initially collected, to make the results of studies 
using publicly funded data available to the public, to 
enable others to ask new questions of extant data and 
advance solutions for complex human problems, to 
advance the state of science, to reproduce research, and 
to expand the instruments and products of research to 
new communities”. The authors use a method of content 
analysis in examining the requirements that exist within 
depositors’ guidelines and deposit forms. The analysis is 
based upon 14 documents from 16 social science data 
repositories. The analysis is not looking into the actual 
content but registering the “required”, “optional” and 
“not mentioned” requirements. It turned out that the 
documents varied significantly, including such surprises 
as not all repositories asked for the title or a description of 
the data study. 

The second paper is authored by Cristina Ribeiro and 
Maria Eugénia Matos Fernandes from the University of 
Porto (Universidade do Porto). As the title outlines - “ 
Data Curation at U.Porto: Identifying current practices 
across disciplinary domains” - we are now turning from 
comparing depositing at different repositories to the 
differences in data curation between different disciplines. 
The study has involved researchers collecting their 
views on data curation and data. The article includes a 
presentation of the University of Porto and the paper 
draws information from a local information system 
called SIGARRA (Information System for the Aggregated 
Management of Resources and Academic Records). This 
system supports authors in making their intellectual 
output centrally available as they sign contracts with 
publishers, so they maintain the right to self-archive their 
work in institutional open repositories that include a data 
repository prototype. The interviews with the researchers 

found that the design of a data repository should be 
determined by researchers’ needs.

From curation and depositing of data, the authors 
Laurence Horton and Alexia Katsanidou from GESIS 
(GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne) 
take a further step in their paper “Purposing your survey: 
archives as a market regulator, or how can archives 
connect supply and demand?”.  The authors start with 
the statement that researchers who are data creators 
and researchers who are data re-users have different 
needs and that archives mediate between them. The 
paper outlines the GESIS plan to create a research data 
management and archive training centre for the European 
research area. In their paper the authors give examples of 
how the re-use of data now has strong political support. 
The European Commission has committed itself to an 
open data policy and this is accompanied by statements 
like “Taxpayers have already paid for this information, the 
least we can do is give it back to those who want to use 
it in new ways…” and “Your data is worth more if you give 
it away”. The arguments presented for data preservation 
and sharing are the technological and financial benefits. 
There are, however, continued obstacles that prevent data 
sharing viewed from the supply side of the social sciences. 
There are restrictions through law and ethics, and also a 
lack of incentives to share data. 

As a publisher the IASSIST Quarterly supports the need 
to have institutional open repositories as mentioned in 
the second paper. We also support “deep links” where you 
link directly to your paper published in the IQ. Articles for 
the IQ are always very welcome. They can be papers from 
IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, 
from local presentations or papers especially written for 
the IQ. If you don’t have anything to offer right now, then 
please prepare yourself for a future IASSIST conference 
and start planning for participation in a session there. 
Chairing a conference session with the purpose of 
aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue 
IQ is much appreciated as the information in the form of 
an IQ issue reaches many more people than the session 
participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST 
website at http://www.iassistdata.org.

Authors are very welcome to take a look at the 
instructions and layout:
http://iassistdata.org/iq/instructions-authors

Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. 
Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for 
the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear 
from you.

Karsten Boye Rasmussen     
May  2012     
Editor