What does it look like to share my research in the STEMEd+ repository?
Repositories are crucial for academic research, allowing the products of that research to be archived, documented, and shared among the academic community. The STEMEd+ repository, Commons Works, is built on the InvenioRDM platform. InvenioRDM, developed at CERN, is designed to connect research across disciplines, easily document changes and version histories, and include highly specific metadata for increased discoverability.
Commons Works is cross-disciplinary, Academy-owned, and completely free to use and to explore. For more on the role of repositories in academic research, read Ian Scott’s What is a Repository For? on the Commons blog.
Commons Works is currently in the final stages of development, and will offer a range of features beyond what you might find in other academic repositories.
Control:
Commons Works allows a high degree of control over the deposit you make. Users can write their own metadata as well as tagging their work with a rich set of subject terms, and they can edit that metadata at any time. Deposits can be saved in draft form to be modified later, and once a version of a deposit is published it can be easily updated. Commons Works tracks that versioning over time, and users can either restrict access to the old versions or hold the whole version history open to the public.
Visibility of a user’s deposits is also entirely in their control. Commons Works allows the user to restrict deposits, or have the metadata be visible but the file itself be restricted; users may also embargo the files for a period of time and set a date for their release. A large array of licensing options allows users to control the uses of a deposit once it has been downloaded.
Collections:
Collections allow you to group deposits in a flexible, responsive way. Individual users can create their own curated subject collection; organizations can create collections and moderate who can add deposits and what kinds of deposits can be made. Teams can create a collection for collaboration, and edit the metadata on one another’s deposits. Faculty and educators can create a collection for a class that is restricted for the semester, and then becomes open once it’s finished, serving as an Open Educational Resource for the broader learning community.
Commons Works Collections can also serve the purpose of a publishing workflow. Editors can invite articles to be submitted through Commons Works, and provide feedback on drafts within the platform itself. Moderation and messaging can all be handled within the repository, and when the collection is finalized it can be published on Commons Works as an issue of an online journal.
Flexibility:
Commons Works offers 72 different deposit types – from a journal article, podcast episode, and syllabus to visualization models, software, and datasets. The deposit form adapts to the type of resource being deposited, creating a rich pool of customized metadata for every kind of scholarship. Each record can consist of one file or multiple, or, if you have deposits elsewhere in other repositories or in gated publications, you can also create a metadata-only record linking out to that data, allowing your Collections to be complete regardless of previous publications or repository use.
The record page, described more on our Explore page, also adapts to the resource type, and allows users to generate citations, share out to social media, and view versioning history for a given file or deposit.