Building a Local Dropbox Alternative to Facilitate Data Deposit

Garnett, Alex (2013) Building a Local Dropbox Alternative to Facilitate Data Deposit. In: Access Conference 2013, September 23-26, 2013, St. John's, NL. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

If you build it, will they come? In the case of research data repositories, the answer has so far been a solid “maybe.” Discipline-specific repositories with some history, like ICPSR or arXiv, have tended to fare better than university institutional repositories over the past several years. There are many possible explanations for why this may be the case, but in general it seems safe to assume that institutional repository-style deposit is not sufficiently consistent with or salient to researchers’ existing workflows. Thus it must come with some additional incentive – a stable home for “green” open access materials, and/or some additional visibility which allows the work to be more easily cited, and credit received for that citation. When surveying our faculty for the features they most wanted to see in our new data repository platform, one of the most common responses was “Dropbox.” BC privacy laws currently preclude SFU faculty from making use of cloud services whose servers may be located in the United States – that is, in effect, all cloud services – and while our CIO has made an outreach effort to explain how and why to obey this policy, in some cases, there is no effective functional equivalent to status-quo cloud services, and some faculty have freely admitted to paying for cloud services while being unable to claim their cost due to university policy. This talk will cover the technical architecture and design considerations of building a local Dropbox alternative to facilitate data deposit.

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