If ETD Data Falls in a Generalist Repository, Does It Make a FAIR Sound? - USETDA 2022.
Channel: USETDA
Date: 2022-09-02

If ETD Data Falls in a Generalist Repository, Does It Make a FAIR Sound? Presented by Andrew Mckenna-Foster (Figshare).

Abstract
For the past 10 years and continuing today, researchers and their support services are adapting to the paradigm of open science and open data. However, creating FAIR (https://go-fair.org) data remains challenging. Graduate students, as potential future full-time researchers, are a population that should show proficiency in data sharing and can greatly benefit from the practice. Sharing data, media, and other non-traditional outputs (NTROs) associated with an electronic thesis or dissertation (ETD) helps students display expertise early in their careers and provide credibility for their work. We were interested in assessing how well graduate students are adhering to the FAIR principles when sharing NTROs, if there is change over time, and if it matters where the records are shared. In this poster, we examine metadata records for ETD data and other outputs and compare metadata quality for records shared directly by students and those shared through an institutional repository. Methods: The Figshare platform offers an ideal set of records to examine because it is used by individual researchers (figshare.com) and for institutional repositories. We used the Figshare API to collect a sample of 710 ETD records and 46 ETD collections and we programmatically and manually evaluated the metadata. Results: We find that records shared in institutional repositories have significantly richer metadata than those from figshare.com and a higher number of views per month, likely illustrating the positive impact of librarians and curation on the FAIRness of outputs. A major area for improvement across all records is appropriate linking to related digital records. We offer suggestions for both data sharing practitioners and the Figshare platform on ways to encourage and apply more FAIR sharing practices.

Poster presentation.

USETDA 2022 Conference. United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association.

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