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ZivaHub Data Sharing and Publishing: Start Up Guide

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

ZivaHub Start Up Guide

Welcome to ZivaHub: Open Data UCT

ZivaHub: Open Data UCT is powered by Figshare for Institutions, an online platform for citing, sharing, and discovering research data. This is a brief user guide which takes you through the basic steps to activate your account and begin using the platform. Figshare for Institutions has a more detailed user guide to assist you further.

Contents

What is ZivaHub?
How to login and upload data
How to navigate the user interface
Additional resources

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
  • 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. 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.


How to login

Logging in is simple - just use your institutional login credentials:

  • Go to https://uct.figshare.com/
  • Click on ‘ log in’ at the top right-hand corner
  • You'll be directed to a SAFIRE 3rd party authentication window:
    • Tick the checkbox to allow SAFIRE to retrieve your information from UCT
    • Select “University of Cape Town” from the list of universities
    • Enter your staff/student number and password
    • Click “login”
  • Your ZivaHub account is automatically activated upon first login and you can now begin uploading research outputs

All staff and students at UCT get 20GB free cloud storage on ZivaHub. To enquire about

increasing your storage allowance, contact Digital Library Services.


How to navigate the user interface

Once you’ve logged in, you will be taken to your “My data” page.

If you’re logging in for the first time, you won’t have any items listed yet, but once you start uploading data, all your previous uploads (both private and public) will be visible on the “My data” page.

To start uploading data, follow these 9 easy steps:

1. Select the +Create a new item button from the top left (or just drag and drop your file into the browser).

2. Insert a Title. For information on how best to complete the fields for maximum exposure of your data, see figshare’s ‘how-to guide’ here . Tips on how to fill out each of the fields can also be found on the right side of the screen.

3. Add Authors. You can rearrange the order in which the authors appear and remove yourself as an author if you are uploading on behalf of someone. You can also search by entering the email address of the author you want to add (you need to enter the entire email address before the system will locate the user).

4. Select a Category. These are taken from the Australian Fields of Research classification system. You can choose more than one and either select from the drop-down menu or search for your subject area. If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, we recommend finding the best option and getting more specific in the Keywords section below.

5. Select the File type from our drop-down menu. We accept any file type and preview over 1,000 file extensions in the browser. If there’s something we don’t support, let us know and we’ll work with figshare to build it for you!

6. Add Keyword(s). These should be more specific than the category and help others find your research. Add as many keywords as you want - just hit enter after each keyword. ZivaHub remembers the keywords that you’ve previously entered and will also suggest keywords for you.

7. Write a Description. This should include any relevant information that pertains to your research - this might include information about the methodology, approval for data collection, or legal or ethical requirements. Be as descriptive as you can!

8. Select a License. You can choose from a number of licenses based on your reuse requirements. We recommend that you choose the default option, CC-BY, which allows others to reuse your data without seeking direct permission from you, as long as they credit you as the original creator of the work.

More information on Creative Commons Licenses here and the default list of figshare licenses here.

9. Tick Publish. By clicking ‘publish’, you accept the UCT Terms of Data Deposit . Make sure everything you have submitted is accurate and complies with these terms - once it’s published, it’s permanently available.

There are, of course, other ways to upload files on figshare. See the Figshare for Institutions end user guide for extended information on how to upload confidential files, linked files, embargoed files, and metadata records only.


Additional Resources