Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy

To facilitate data publication from within the University of California system and beyond, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) is developing a new ingest and discovery overlay layer for our data curation service, Dash.The new overlay– dubbed Stash (STore And SHare)– will feature an enhanced user interface with a simple and intuitive deposit workflow, that nevertheless accommodates rich user-supplied metadata. Through Stash, researchers will upload their data by browsing local files or by drag-and-drop; describe it with scientifically-meaningful metadata such as methods, references, and geospatial location; obtain persistent identifiers for data citation and retrieval; and preserve and publish their data. Data published through Stash will be discoverable through faceted search and browse, including search by geospatial location. Stash can be implemented in conjunction with any standards-compliant repository that supports the SWORD protocol for deposit and OAI-PMH or ResourceSync for metadata harvesting. UC3 will develop support for the DataCite and Dublin Core metadata schemas, but Stash is designed with a pluggable architecture that can accommodate other schemas to support discipline-specific applications. By alleviating many of the barriers that have historically precluded wider adoption of open data principles, Stash empowers individual scholars to assert active control over their research outputs; encourages data preservation, publication, sharing, and reuse; and promotes open scholarly inquiry and advancement.