The below outlines how the publication of items on ZivaHub, UCT’s open data repository (powered by Figshare for Institutions), is managed by the Digital Library Services team at UCT Libraries.
Step 1 – Ingest
A UCT depositor signs on to the ZivaHub platform and uploads an item (data and metadata) onto ZivaHub Platform and submits it for publication.
- The unique identity of a ZivaHub depositor is secured by the required login using UCT’s institutional credentials via SSO (Single Sign-On). Only university staff and students may deposit to the repository.
- It is recommended to researchers to use open file formats when publishing on ZivaHub.
- During upload, MD5 checksums are used to check the files for defects and restore correct versions if necessary.
- After uploading items, depositors are required to complete the minimum metadata information as set by the DataCiteV3 schema provided by Figshare for Institutions. They may also make use of departmental specific curation checklists as well as helpful guides.
- By submitting for publication, the user accepts the ZivaHub Terms of Data Deposit as well as the UCT Research Data Management policy.
Step 2 – Curation & Review
Data Curators (within Digital Library Services) and Data Stewards (faculty/department) review submitted items to verifying that they meet institutional requirements and policies.
- Data will not be published without passing the acceptable standards of the community in which it is published, as assessed by the Data Curator and Data Steward roles in the curated publication process (review workflow).
- Data Stewards, members of staff and senior students of UCT, enable and support good data sharing practice and ensure that viable records are published by the various research disciplines at UCT.
- In this review process, quality assurance checks are done on the data files, metadata, and documentation files of the deposit. This includes a completing a legal compliance checklist.
- For most submissions, the review process is supported by departmental, or discipline specific curation checklists which outline the best practices for making data FAIR within those respective fields of research, indicatingappropriate filetypes, appropriate keywords, descriptive text structure, etc.
- Items which do not pass the review process are rejected. The depositor is contacted, and the item is sent back to the depositor for corrections and resubmission. The full review process restarts with an updated submission.
Step 3 – Publication and Dissemination
Once an item passes the review process it is published on the ZivaHub Repository with an active DOI for persistent identification.
- Published items are stored on Figshare through Amazon Web Services storage. Amazon S3 stores multiple, redundant copies and provides authentication mechanisms to prevent unauthorised access.
- An active DOI for the dataset is registered and attached to the published item. DOIs are minted with UCT identification and are included with a suggested citation.
- ZivaHub data and metadata is made available through the user interface, a REST API and OAI-PMH. ZivaHub publications are exposed and brokered through external indexing systems such as DataCite, CORE, OpenAire & OpenDOAR and allows for integration with other systems such as ORCID. ZivaHub ensures all content is marked up for discovery in all common search engines, including indexed in Google Scholar, and Google Dataset Search.
- Once published, depositors are allowed to update their dataset, subject to the same curation review process as mentioned above. Published changes are considered an updated version, with the version number reflected in the DOI.
Step 4 – Preservation (in implementation)
The published item is copied through an automated integration process to UCT’s preservation system for long-term active preservation and storage.
- MD5 checksums are also used to confirm the correct copy of the file from ZivaHub to the preservation system.
- The copies sit in a dedicated pool within the preservation system dedicated to ZivaHub and can be found through using the metadata provided (such as data of publication, and/or author).
- Normalised copies of the original files (versions converted to more sustainable file formats) are created for long-term access.
- Preservation copies of files need only be accessed if published files are no longer available for some reason. Access to the preservation system storage is limited to the Data Curators of Digital Library Services.
- The system will run periodic checks on the bit-integrity of preserved files and apply any further normalisation rules.
- The preservation system is administered by Digital Library Services.
