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ZivaHub Data Sharing and Publishing: Home

This guide details all the information needed when using UCT's Institutional Repository ZivaHub

Mission

ZivaHub’s mission is to make the research data captured by the University of Cape Town staff and students FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). Its objective is to ensure that such data remains accessible to researchers and the public from around the world, and preserve it for future generations. 

Welcome

Welcome to the ZivaHub Guide. This Guide will provide information on processes, procedures, policy and workflows with regards to the repository.  ZivaHub: Open Data UCT , is an online, institutional data repository that serves as a publishing and access platform to research data and scholarly outputs. It is powered by Figshare for Institutions  and is available to all students and staff at UCT. Ziva is the Shona word for knowledge.

ZivaHub allows you to make your research data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). Some of the key features of the system are:

  • Get DOIs (persistent identifiers) for your research outputs
  • Increase citations and boost your research metrics
  • Comply with NRF and other funders’ requirements
  • Control how your research outputs are accessed
  • Validate and authenticate your research outputs

 

This guide is also intended to support the UCT community in effective research data management at the 'sharing and publishing' stage of the Research Data Lifecycle. This guide is developed by the Digital Library Services Department

 

Why Share your data?

What Is ZivaHub

ZivaHub is a place to make all your research data citable, shareable, and discoverable. It’s a place to share your supplementary research to make them first class outputs. Share both positive and negative results and get credit for all your research.
The most important things about ZivaHub, powered by figshare:
Your research is assigned a DOI. This means you can cite it as a research output alongside your paper or as a freestanding piece of data

  • The DOI minted via ZivaHub makes your data publication identifiable as UCT output (it contains the letters 'uct’)
  • It complies with funder mandates around making data openly accessible and stored in perpetuity
  • You can use ZivaHub to make your data private or share it with the world by making it public
  • Everything that is uploaded to ZivaHub (that you choose to make public) is indexed with Google Scholar and Google Data Search. This helps improve the exposure of your research
  • Uploading your data is a quick and painless process! See below for more information on how to upload your content in 9 easy steps.

What Happens To Your Data

In publishing any research output on ZivaHub, you are accepting the UCT terms of data deposit .

After you upload, publish and accept the terms of deposit on ZivaHub, your dataset will go into review by a Digital Library Services curator, before being openly published on the platform. In collaboration with a designated Data Steward from your department, the DLS curator will check the metadata of the submitted item and, if appropriate, offer suggestions on how it may be improved upon for optimal citability, discoverability, integrity and reusability.

All published items on ZivaHub qualify for preservation on UCT's Digital Preservation System Izolo.

Research Data Management

If you would like to find out more about Research Data Management and Creating Data Management Plans see our RDM Libguide

Support

Thandokazi Maceba (Data Curation Officer)

Level 7, Chancellor Oppenheimer Library

Library Road, Upper Campus

Email: thandokazi.maceba@uct.ac.za

Tel: 021-650-7073

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Sanjin Muftic (Digital Scholarship Specialist)

Level 7, Chancellor Oppenheimer Library

Library Road, Upper Campus

Email: sanjin.muftic@uct.ac.za

Tel: 021-650-5537