Eleni Castro Shares News from the Dataverse Network

April 4, 2014
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IQSS Research Coordinator Eleni Castro and her colleagues on the Dataverse Network (DVN) team, fresh off the launch of the Open Journal Systems project, are looking forward to the upcoming release of the new Dataverse.

At the 9th International Digital Curation Conference in February, Eleni Castro and Alex Garnett (Simon Fraser University) presented on the Sloan-funded Public Knowledge Project (PKP)-Dataverse Integration Project. Castro and Garnett demonstrated PKP's Open Journal Systems' (OJS) new Dataverse plugin that will allow authors to automatically deposit datasets and other supplementary files to Dataverse (via DVN's new Data Deposit API) when they submit a corresponding journal article in OJS. This is a reference implementation with code and documentation openly available for other repositories and journal systems to help make data sharing, citation and preservation an intrinsic and seamless part of the scholarly publication process. More information on the PKP-Dataverse collaborative project can be found at the project website.

The Harvard Dataverse Network itself will also see changes in the coming months—the DVN team at IQSS is working toward the launch of Dataverse 4.0, scheduled for June 2014. Based on multiple rounds of usability testing, Castro explains, features to look forward to in the new version include:

  • Major user interface redesign with simpler workflows
  • Improved browse/search features
  • Expanded metadata to help improve discovery of datasets in social sciences and other disciplines (expanding to Biomedical and Astrophysics)
  • New interactive data exploration/analysis tool
  • Redesigned "My Account" page with "data related to you" and notifications
  • Tabular files support expanded to the processing of Excel and CSV files
  • Simplified branding for a dataverse, plus widgets to embed in any website

Castro's work on the Dataverse 4.0 release includes coordinating, planning and implementing metadata expansion. She is currently consulting with over 12 different groups within and outside of the Harvard community, in order to gain a better perspective of the needs of different researchers and other stakeholders when they deposit and discover datasets in Dataverse.

If you are interested in details about Dataverse 4.0 and the DVN team's many other projects, please visit the Dataverse Network blog for details. More information will be made available in the weeks to come.