University Libraries

University libraries can use the NII Research Data Cloud as a place to advise researchers on where and how to store and share files, publish research outputs, and look for new research materials. This is becoming increasingly necessary with growing research collaborations across various institutions, and the growing need for accountability and research transparency. Additionally, with the exponentially growing number of research publications and data, researchers are in desperate need of an appropriate discovery tool that will enable to find the right publication and data for their research. NII Research Data Cloud will serve these needs.
At the same time, support from the university libraries is needed for curating and adding proper metadata in order to make the academic resources findable and reusable.

Published research outputs in WEKO3 are disseminated in human-readable formats on the Web and in a machine-readable format. For example, WEKO3 supports metadata provision protocol by OAI-PMH and ResourceSync. WEKO3 also supports sitemap and Google Scholar meta tag, and Open Graph Protocol for social services.

WEKO3 has a function to automatically publish research outputs on a specific date (embargo function). For example, WEKO3 allows setting the publication settings such as making the registered research outputs accessible only within a particular institution and, after one year, making it available to the public.

WEKO3 manages and publishes the research outputs of academic institutions in units of items. The item type represents the metadata of the item and can be flexibly customized by the user institution. By mapping the customized item type to a specific XML schema, metadata output using the XML schema is possible.

In order to promote the reuse of research data, it is not enough to publish research data. It is necessary to assign appropriate metadata and improve the data's appearance to make it easier for users to use. This kind of curation requires not only knowledge of the specialized field of research data but also knowledge and skills in research data management methodologies. In Japan, university librarians, URAs (University Research Administrators), and database administrators are expected to do this.

In order to ensure the reliability of results published in papers, researchers are required to publish the data on which they base their findings. However, unless the programs used to process the data are also made available, other researchers will not be able to reproduce the results. With the NII RDC Computational Services, the program used for data processing and its execution environment can be packaged, linked to the paper and data, and publicated so that the results can be reproduced by anyone.

In the "Design and Practice of Research Data Management Services" course, you will learn what you need to know to support research data management. Research data has a lifecycle: how it is generated, stored, and finally reused. In this course, you will learn about service design, pre-research support, in-research support, post-research support, and day-to-day support in a way that follows the research data lifecycle.

GakuNin LMS allows the person in charge of the institution to view students' enrollment status at each institution based on their login information linked to GakuNin Federation. This supports systematic course management by the person in charge of the institution and provides primary data for efficient provision and evaluation of course materials according to the students' attributes.

To meet the demands for data curation that cannot be covered by a single institution, the data curation system will provide a human network infrastructure of data curators in various fields belonging to inter-university research institutions and research organizations and support staff at university libraries and other institutions. University libraries will be able to aggregate curation needs from researchers at their institutions and request data curators from other institutions to curate research data in various fields.

For institutional repository staff to make articles by affiliated researchers open access, it is necessary to investigate the publication status and archiving policies. The former requires searching the journal article databases, and the latter requires checking the homepages of the journals.

For researchers to use research data in the humanities and social sciences, it is necessary to look up the institutions that publish research data and search for the research data that meets their needs in each institution's repository. As an environment for centrally exploring each institution's research data, we are developing Japan Data Catalog for the Humanities and Social Sciences (JDCat) on behalf of the Project for Promotion of the Construction of a Data Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.