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Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
Summary
The ResearchOps Community is more than halfway through their third global project, this one on Research Repositories. Join Dana Chrisfield and Brigette Metzler as they take you through a short tour of what the project team have done so far, what they've learned, and what's next.
Key Insights
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Research repositories are inherently social tools that enable knowledge sharing beyond just storing data, requiring strategies to socialize and evangelize findings.
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There is a significant operational divide between the skills researchers have and those needed to build and maintain effective research repositories.
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Mature, well-funded research repositories are rare; many organizations rely on fragmented and informal systems like Google Drive or Airtable.
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Research repositories must serve multiple user roles and use cases across the research lifecycle, balancing immediate evaluative insights with durable strategic knowledge.
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A key challenge is incentivizing researchers to contribute consistently to repositories due to lack of direct benefit or recognition.
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Good governance involving legal consent and data sharing policies is critical and complex, requiring regional and international compliance considerations.
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The project developed a standardized vocabulary and taxonomy to enable consistent tagging and categorization of research artifacts.
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The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted planned workshops but also emphasized the need for flexible digital collaboration and lowered community pressure.
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Secondary researchers or communications specialists who manage repository knowledge socialization are rare but could greatly enhance repository effectiveness.
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Open source tools like the consent form builder partnered with Consent Kit provide scalable legal frameworks for sharing user research ethically.
Notable Quotes
"Research repositories and libraries are social things — many teams look for best practices beyond just building a library."
"Put more in than you take out — that’s the rule of thumb I give for contributing to repositories."
"Having a repo isn’t the same as having a strategy for socializing and evangelizing the research."
"Maintaining a research repository often requires 100% manual participation from researchers, which can be hard to enforce."
"Research Ops needs an operational brain — it’s not the kind of brain researchers usually carry."
"We decided to take a broad definition of research repositories to lessen shame and embrace the complexity of current practices."
"There’s a tension in repositories having to serve immediate product decisions and more durable, strategic knowledge."
"Mature research repositories are rare, and return on investment depends heavily on scale, governance, and organizational structure."
"Researchers are often nervous about their research being used in the wrong way, so trust and communication matter."
"We partnered with Consent Kit to create and maintain an open source consent form builder that addresses multiple legal frameworks."
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