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DARIAH recently released a report on open access publishing of research data in the humanities. It is part of DARIAH’s Humanities at Scale project (HaS). As an output of work package 7 the report is a first step in the design process of an Open Humanities Data Platform, which will be the main result of this work package. The report serves as input for the design and sustainability plan, and will ultimately contribute to creating this platform.

Improving access to research data
Improved access to research data is a key aspect of DARIAH’s mission as a digital research infrastructure. In addition, open access publishing is increasingly becoming a requirement for researchers funded under certain funding schemes. At the moment, researchers funded by Horizon 2020 in nine dedicated research areas are obliged to publish their research data as open data. From 2017 onwards this will be extended to researchers in all disciplinary areas.

Overview on open access publishing
Against this background, the HaS-DARIAH report on open access publishing for research data gives an overview of the various aspects of the open access publishing of research data in the humanities. It defines key concepts and describes the research data life cycle. It gives an overview of stakeholders involved in open access publishing, and analyses advantages and obstacles for researchers to share their research data. Furthermore, a description of the European data repositories is given, followed by an overview of certification standards of trusted digital data repositories and the possibilities of data citation. The authors discuss standards and the use of metadata in the humanities, as well as a best practice example of an open access research data system in the humanities: the French open research data ecosystem.

Download the report
The report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. It can be downloaded from the HAL archives: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01357208/document. For an overview of DARIAH related documents in HAL go to https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/DARIAH.

Open Archive HAL: Finding DARIAH’s publications
In the open archive HAL authors deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields. DARIAH uses HAL to make accessible publications from its network. The service is available in English and French. It is a contribution to DARIAH from 2015 of the french Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD). The CCSD a joint service center of CNRS, INRIA and the University of Lyon.

More information
For more information on the report, DARIAH and the Humanities at Scale Project, please contact DARIAH-EU’s communications officer Jakob Epler.