Merchandise Mart, River North, Chicago, IL by w_lemay, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

On September 19-20, 2024, members from the seven participating repositories in the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) met in Chicago for the GREI Year 3 Annual Meeting to celebrate the achievements of Year 3 of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded, data sharing and open science-focused, four-year initiative. The event was held at Chicago’s historic Merchandise Mart at MATTER, a global healthcare startup incubator, community nexus, and corporate innovation accelerator.

The GREI program’s primary mission is to establish a common set of cohesive and consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure across generalist repositories. The program’s secondary mission is to raise general awareness and help researchers adopt FAIR principles to better share and reuse data. This is particularly important for the health research community to fulfill data sharing requirements per the NIH’s Policy on Data Management and Sharing. Generalist repositories are essential infrastructure to enable data sharing when discipline-specific or institutional repositories cannot be identified or do not exist.

The plans for the third year of GREI have been nearly fully implemented, and the group that gathered in Chicago last month reported on outcomes and completed planning exercises for priorities for Year 4. The Year 3 plan is published and available on GitHub, and is broken down into eight objectives. Below is an outline of how Zenodo representatives contributed to each objective, foundational work which often aligned with improvements being made for the InvenioRDM development and user communities:

Desirable Characteristics for All Data Repositories (for sharing scientific data)

  • Zenodo team members co-led the effort to update the Generalist Repository Comparison Chart, a tool to help researchers select the best generalist repository to meet their needs. The new version is projected for Spring 2025
  • Zenodo team members co-led the team which created the Generalist Repository Selection Flowchart, a tool designed to guide users through a series of considerations while selecting the best repository to share data

Consistent Metadata

  • Zenodo and InvenioRDM continue to adhere to the recommended GREI standard, which incorporates the DataCite metadata schema. In addition, InvenioRDM already has capability for further suggested metadata enhancements, such as incorporation of LCSH and MeSH subject headings and CRediT contributor role taxonomy roles

Search & Browse

  • Work is ongoing to explore a cross-GREI-repository search option. Meanwhile, InvenioRDM has already achieved a further recommendation: incorporation of ROR, the identification registry for research organizations

Analytics & Reporting

  • Zenodo team members are co-leading the effort to share the Make Data Count usage metrics with the wider community via DataCite

Use Cases

  • Zenodo team members co-led the task group responsible for updating the Use Case catalog with two new use cases: one outlining a scenario where a researcher utilizes a generalist repository in lieu of a local institutional repository, and one scenario where a researcher must deposit portions of a heterogenous dataset into several different repositories, one of which is a generalist repository

Connecting Digital Objects

  • Zenodo team members are working on the effort to map DataCite relationTypes to all types of non-data research objects, and to submit any needed updates to DataCite via API
  • InvenioRDM has also completed work on the FAIR signposting recommendation, thanks to Guillaume Viger’s work on signposting

QA/QC

  • Zenodo team members are contributing to a comprehensive review and report on approaches to handling personal or sensitive data, as well as a comprehensive review of how QA/QC on data is done at each GREI repository

Training & Community Engagement

  • Zenodo team members are actively involved in the multiple GREI webinars, conference proposals, and blog posts produced each project year

The GREI-Zenodo team members look forward to continuing our efforts through all the above projects, and new ones in Year 4, to provide an interoperable, robust repository option to US-based health researchers. Additional GREI milestones that can positively impact InvenioRDM development will be reported on in future telecons.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy/Office of the NIH Director pursuant to OTA-21-009, “Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI)” through Other Transactions Agreement (OTA) Number OT2DB000013.