Promoting Use in the Humanities and Social Sciences

In recent years, while open access to research data and publications has been encouraged, it has become increasingly important to clarify rights related to digital content and to protect privacy information. In the humanities and social sciences, which focus on human activities, it is often difficult to make research materials publicly available due to licensing restrictions, confidentiality, and privacy considerations.
At RCOS, we are exploring methods for handling such difficult-to-publish content and developing functions that enable the sharing of research materials using the NII Research Data Infrastructure.

To make effective use of research data in the humanities and social sciences, it is necessary to identify institutions that publish such data and search each institutional repository for data that meets specific needs. To provide an environment for unified cross-institutional search, we developed tthe Japan Data Catalog for the Humanities and Social Sciences (JDCat) under commission from the Program for Constructing Data Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
JFollowing a pilot release in July 2021, JDCat has been publicly available since November 2021. It enables users to search research data held by Japanese institutions in the humanities and social sciences files using advanced search and faceted search. Some datasets indexed in JDCat are integrated with the Code Package Function, allowing users to analyze the retrieved data immediately using R or Python.

Some research data contains content that should not be openly shared. In fields such as medicine and the social sciences, data is not made publicly accessible to protect the privacy of study participants; instead, it is provided only to users who meet certain criteria. This type of controlled provision of research content is called restricted access or restricted sharing, and about half of the world's research data repositories support this type of content provision.
Under this service, we are developing restricted-access publication functions tailored to a wide range of academic fields using the Publishing Platform, and are operating them on a trial basis via JGSSDDS. By using this function, it is possible to set conditions for data usage and provide research data containing confidential or privacy-sensitive information only to users who meet those conditions.
If your institution is interested in this function, please contact:.

In recent years, an increasing number of journals have required authors to provide the evidence data used in preparing their manuscripts to reviewers via a repository as a condition of submission. Because such evidence data is under review, it is often difficult to make it public; therefore, a mechanism is needed that allows only specific authorized users, such as reviewers, to access non-public content while maintaining anonymity.
Under this service, we are developing a function using he Publishing Platform to provide evidence data for journal articles to reviewers. With this function, researchers can generate a secret URL link to their registered evidence data from a research data registration page that is set to non-public status. By sharing this secret URL with reviewers, they can obtain the evidence data directly from the repository.
This function will be available for early access from FY2024. If your institution is interested in this function, please contact: .