arXiv subjects

Dorothea Strecker

Publications and source records attributed to Dorothea Strecker.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Sustaining Dryad: Reconfiguring relationships and 'thinking like a business' to maintain open data infrastructures

Open data infrastructures underpin how open research is practiced across communities. While critical, the longevity of such infrastructures is far from certain, as they grapple with challenges related to technologies, dominant ideologies, and continued funding streams. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Dryad, a well-known open data infrastructure, to deeply explore one of these challenges: the quest for stable funding. Our analysis shows how Dryad has carefully reconfigured different forms of relationships and revenue models throughout its history to work towards financial sustainability. We identify four types of relationships with customers, collaborators, and competitors that have been critical to Dryad's financial evolution: reinforcing, forging, positioning, and excluding relationships. We argue that while implementing strategic, business thinking is a critical strategy, it is also one which shapes other factors important in sustainability: interpretations of value(s), community, and governance. We conclude by highlighting emerging tensions that provide insight for other open data infrastructures working to become financially sustainable. As a whole, our analysis focuses not just on financial mechanisms for funding open data infrastructures (although those emerge) but on the relationships which enable them.

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arXiv2026

Metadata conflicts and their impact on DataCite metadata completeness in disciplinary research data repositories

This paper investigates how eight disciplinary research data repositories from the geosciences and social sciences navigate metadata conflicts - conflicts in implementations of the same standard and inter-standard conflicts - and how these conflicts affect the completeness of DataCite metadata. It combines results from analyzing DataCite metadata records, structural differences between three disciplinary metadata schemas and the DataCite Metadata Schema, and a direct comparison of two metadata records describing the same dataset. The results show that both conflicts in implementations of the same standard and inter-standard conflicts contribute to incomplete DataCite metadata. In addition to inherent differences between the metadata schemas, workflows and conscious decisions by the repositories also contribute to these conflicts. Some of these conflicts could be resolved by updated metadata crosswalks, emerging initiatives for retroactive collaborative metadata enrichment, the implementation of metadata application profiles or schema updates. Other conflicts can't be resolved or are strongly connected to the repository mission. The results also highlight that metadata completeness is multifaceted, and assessment requires careful consideration of context.

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arXiv2026

Pursuing transparency: How research performing organizations in Germany collect data on publication costs

This article presents the results of a survey conducted in 2024 among research performing organizations (RPOs) in Germany on how they collect data on publication costs. Of the 583 invitees, 258 (44.3%) completed the questionnaire. This survey is the first comprehensive study on the recording of publication costs at RPOs in Germany. The results show that the majority of surveyed RPOs recorded publication costs at least in part. However, procedures in this regard were often non-binding. Respondents' ratings of the reliability of the collection of data on publication costs varied by the source of publication funding. Eighty percent of respondents rated the contribution of collecting data on publication costs to shaping the open access transformation as "very important" or "important." Yet, these data were used as a basis for strategic decisions in only 59% of the surveyed RPOs. Moreover, most respondents considered the implementation of an information budget at their institutions by 2025 unlikely. We discuss the implications of these findings for the open access transformation.

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arXiv2025

How are research data referenced? The use case of the research data repository RADAR

Publishing research data aims to improve the transparency of research results and facilitate the reuse of datasets. In both cases, referencing the datasets that were used is recommended. Research data repositories can support data referencing through various measures and also benefit from it, for example using this information to demonstrate their impact. However, the literature shows that the practice of formally citing research data is not widespread, data metrics are not yet established, and effective incentive structures are lacking. This article examines how often and in what form datasets published via the research data repository RADAR are referenced. For this purpose, the data sources Google Scholar, DataCite Event Data and the Data Citation Corpus were analyzed. The analysis shows that 27.9 % of the datasets in the repository were referenced at least once. 21.4 % of these references were (also) present in the reference lists and are therefore considered data citations. Datasets were referenced often in data availability statements. A comparison of the three data sources showed that there was little overlap in the coverage of references. In most cases (75.8 %), data and referencing objects were published in the same year. Two definition approaches were considered to investigate data reuse. 118 RADAR datasets were referenced more than once. Only 21 references had no overlaps in the authorship information -- these datasets were referenced by researchers that were not involved in data collection.

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arXiv2024

How permanent are metadata for research data? Understanding changes in DataCite metadata

With the move towards open research information, the DOI registration agency DataCite is increasingly used as a source for metadata describing research data, for example to perform scientometric analyses. However, there is a lack of research on how DataCite metadata describing research data are created and maintained. This paper adresses this gap by using DataCite metadata provenance information to analyze the overall prevalence and patterns of change to DataCite metadata records. Metadata change was observed for 12.18 % of metadata records in the sample, and change tends to be incremental and not extensive. DataCite metadata records offer reliable descriptions of datasets and are stable enough to be used in scientometric research. The rate of change differs from previous studies of metadata change in other contexts, suggesting that there are differences in metadata practices between research data repositories and more traditional cataloging environments. The observed changes do not seem to fully align with idealized conceptualizations of metadata creation and maintenance for research data. In particular, the data does not show that metadata records are maintained routinely and continuously. Metadata change also has a limited effect on metadata completeness.

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arXiv2023

Disappearing repositories -- taking an infrastructure perspective on the long-term availability of research data

Currently, there is limited research investigating the phenomenon of research data repositories being shut down, and the impact this has on the long-term availability of data. This paper takes an infrastructure perspective on the preservation of research data by using a registry to identify 191 research data repositories that have been closed and presenting information on the shutdown process. The results show that 6.2 % of research data repositories indexed in the registry were shut down. The risks resulting in repository shutdown are varied. The median age of a repository when shutting down is 12 years. Strategies to prevent data loss at the infrastructure level are pursued to varying extent. 44 % of the repositories in the sample migrated data to another repository, and 12 % maintain limited access to their data collection. However, both strategies are not permanent solutions. Finally, the general lack of information on repository shutdown events as well as the effect on the findability of data and the permanence of the scholarly record are discussed.

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