The primary purpose of UCT’s open data repository, ZivaHub is to enable yourself and your collaborators to openly publish your research outputs, making them findable and citable as FAIR-compliant scholarly data. ZivaHub is a place to store securely and then privately share such outputs, e.g. tabular data, images, video, presentations, posters, code, book chapters, and more. There are several situations where you may need this feature, for example: during the peer-review process before publishing in a journal, during supervision or before finalising a thesis submission. Please note that this guideline is explicitly about creating private links, which are not for publishing. The private link created will expire and should not be cited anywhere.
Navigate to https://zivahub.uct.ac.za/ and click ‘Log in’
Enter your UCT username and password (the connection is encrypted)
Under ‘My data,’ click on ‘+ Create a new item’
Enter the required metadata (see green dots). Refer to the relevant tips provided. At the bottom of the form click on ‘Save changes.’ NB: Do not tick ‘Publish.’
Note: If you did tick ‘Publish’ by mistake before clicking on ‘Save changes,’ the data will not be published right away, so you can still contact DLS to advise further.
Now click on ‘Generate private link,’ which will create a unique link that you can copy and paste into a direct message to the person you want to give exclusive access to the item.
Once you have received confirmation from them that they no longer need access, simply navigate back to this item under your ‘My data’ tab ...
… and click on the pencil icon to edit it:
Now you can click on ‘disable’ in order to remove the private link again. The data will remain securely saved on the encrypted repository, accessible only to you via your ‘My data’ tab.
Note: recipient-specific links are on the 2021 development roadmap for ZivaHub.
Additional Resources
Collaboration: Projects vs. Collections | Formatting your Research Outputs | Best practice for managing your outputs
FAIR: FAIR Principles | Increasing your exposure using the FAIR data principles | Figshare Google Scholar discoverability
General: FAQs | Figtionary | Figshare for Institutions end user guide | Figshare support videos on YouTube
