The University of California's Digital Library (CDL) and its partners have launched DataUp, a free data management tool. Researchers trying to meet their data management requirements from funders, journals and their own institutions can now reportedly use the DataUp Web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data.
It has been observed that scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they are useless without proper documentation and long-term storage. Data sharing also is strongly encouraged in the scientific community but is not the norm in many disciplines, including earth, ecological and environmental sciences. DataUp seeks to address these issues.
CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections and DataONE to create the DataUp tool, which is free to use and creates a direct link between researchers and data repositories. CDL has also announced that the DataUp project has been contributed to the Outercurve Foundation's Research Accelerator Gallery.
The DataUp add-in operates within Microsoft Excel. The web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format.
Both the add-in and the web application allow users to perform a "best practices check" to ensure data are well-formatted and organised, create standardised metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template. They also retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository and post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.
Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.
An added advantage of ONEShare is its connection to the DataONE network of repositories, it has been noted. DataONE links existing data centres and enables users to search for data across participating repositories by using a single search interface. Data deposited into ONEShare will be indexed and made available by any DataONE user, facilitating collaboration and enabling data re-use.
CDL envisions the future of DataUp directed by the participating community at large. Interested developers can expand on and increase the tool's functionality to meet the needs of a broad array of researchers. Code for both the add-in and web application is open source and participation in its improvement is strongly encouraged.
