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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 require a focus on people and community, not just technology.
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Most organizations lack mature research repositories, often relying on ad hoc tools like Google Drive and spreadsheets.
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Maintaining a repository demands operational effort and cannot rely solely on researchers, highlighting a divide between research and research ops roles.
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The project took a broad inclusive definition of repositories to reduce shame and embrace the messy reality researchers face.
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The research team conducted 49 interviews globally and synthesized themes to understand repository challenges and needs.
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Governance, particularly around data laws internationally, is critical and was synthesized into a detailed Airtable resource.
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Developing a shared vocabulary and taxonomy supports extensibility and consistent tagging across repositories.
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Repositories face tension between supporting immediate, evaluative research needs and long-term, strategic archival value.
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Incentivizing researcher participation in repositories is essential, as there is often no clear benefit for researchers to add to these tools.
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Measuring the direct impact of repositories remains challenging, with limited examples of business cases or ROI clearly defined.
Notable Quotes
"Research repositories and libraries are social things."
"Having a repo isn’t the same as having a strategy for socializing and evangelizing the research."
"Most organizations are using a stack of tools like Google Drive, SharePoint, or Airtable, not mature repositories."
"Maintaining a repo often requires 100% manual participation from researchers and that can be hard to enforce and monitor."
"The skills involved in building and maintaining a repo aren’t necessarily those that researchers carry."
"We took a broad definition of research repositories to lessen shame and embrace the complexity."
"We want to create clarity because lack of clarity is why we struggle with research repositories."
"There’s a tension between immediate evaluative research and more durable insights for future use."
"In large organizations, research teams usually pay for the repo but the value is delivered across the whole company."
"If you put more in than you take out of a repository, that’s a good rule of thumb."
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