Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines to Improve Research Data Repositories

The emergence of research data repositories within various disciplines presents an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained within repositories from a particular discipline to improve the capabilities of repositories in other disciplines. Such knowledge sharing can include the policies and practices as well as the adoption of tools, techniques, cloud storage, features, and open source software to improve the practices of research data repositories across multiple disciplines. For example, approaches for archiving, curating, and sharing open data that have been developed and found effective in one discipline could be improved at another data repository to address the needs of the user community within a different discipline. Such improvements could be further developed within other disciplines and adopted across multiple domains by more repositories. Knowledge sharing across disciplines to improve capabilities of research data repositories can result in gains for the open data repository ecosystem and for users of research data world-wide. During this joint session, opportunities for sharing knowledge to improve data repository capabilities across disciplines are shared, followed by a discussion of ways to improve knowledge sharing among data repositories across disciplinary boundaries. Proposed outcomes of the joint session include the identification of research data repository practices that can be applied across disciplines along with the identification of opportunities for sharing knowledge among data repositories that serve different disciplines.