Scientific data repositories in South America: a FAIR compliance analysis

Abstract

The research had as an end studying the data phenomenon generated by the scientific process and the development of services that face the rising challenges of data management and curation, which involves volumes of digital resources in constant expansion. The research problem is on the environments and practices responsible for digital asset organization resulting from the contemporary scientific investigation. The study objects of such inquiry were: the data; the datasets; the FAIR Principles; and the institutional digital repositories of scientific data. The research objective was to investigate the management and curation of scientific datasets deposited in south american institutional digital repositories in light of the FAIR Principles. The investigation consisted of an applied, qualitative, exploratory, analytical, bibliographic and documentary research. The scientific data repositories were surveyed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories, better known as the RE3DATA. The data collection was made in the selected repositories. Content analysis was used to obtain the research results. The findings indicate that the software behind the investigated repositories which are fit to the management and curation of scientific data are Morpho, Dspace, and Dataverse. The repositories in greater compliance with the FAIR Principles were established by the use of Dataverse. It was concluded that information professionals should seek their training in data, starting with the planning of projects and institutional policies aimed at the implementation of scientific data repositories, including the understanding of the divergent needs among communities, the technical computational knowledge required for such practices, and ideally, the search for standardization and maintenance of these services.