The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) 2023 Roundup
Lisa Curtin
Dear all,
As the year draws to a close, the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) team are reflecting on what we’ve achieved throughout the year and wanted to take this opportunity to share our highlights from 2023 and some of the key resources we’ve created with you.
We began the year by hosting a full two-day workshop in January, sponsored by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (NIH-ODSS), that included presentations and panel discussions as well as interactive training. The GREI Workshop was designed for NIH-funded researchers, both intramural and extramural, and those supporting NIH-funded researchers and data sharing at academic institutions and libraries as well as other stakeholders at NIH and institutions. You can view the summary report here as well as slides & videos from the workshop.
We were also thrilled to publish our use case catalog, demonstrating how generalist repositories support data sharing and discovery use cases for researchers, institutions, and funders. You can read our blog post which dives deeper into the use case catalog project here, and explore the documented use cases here, via the GREI Zenodo Community.
Another milestone that the group reached this year was sharing the outcomes of our work on consistent metadata including publishing the first version of a GREI metadata recommendation and presenting this in a webinar. Having consistent metadata fields, vocabularies and persistent identifiers in use across the generalist repositories is key to achieving the GREI goal of enhancing support for NIH data sharing, discovery, and reuse. The GREI repositories will now use the set of recommendations based on DataCite fields to increase the alignment of their own metadata schemas.
Another webinar we hosted focused on ‘Meaningful Metrics’, and our ongoing work and collaboration with Make Data Count. The session explored the context of the Make Data Count initiative and the implementation of meaningful data metrics across the GREI initiative. You can watch the full recording of that session here.
The GREI team have also participated in several key events throughout 2023. For many of these events, we have summary blog posts available detailing our contributions and learnings from these conferences. You can explore some highlights below:
The GREI repositories at Open Repositories 2023 — Stellenbosch, South Africa
A Workshop on Data Sharing in Generalist Repositories at the 2023 NIH Research Festival
This public-facing work represents the sustained and coordinated efforts of the seven generalist repositories and the NIH GREI program team to work together to make aligned platform developments, conduct community outreach, share best practices and ultimately reduce barriers to data sharing.
All seven generalist repositories are proud to participate in GREI and to collaborate via a “coopetition” (competition + cooperation) as we work together to enhance NIH data sharing and discovery in generalist repositories. In September GREI team members had the opportunity to gather together for two days in Oakland, CA, to work together in person and take a deep dive into our current and future work in GREI. As we look ahead to 2024, it is imperative that we continue to serve the research community, ensuring that we work to make FAIR data sharing as easy as possible for researchers and reduce as many barriers as we can for data discovery, tracking, and reuse
In the near future, we are also planning to host community calls, to further enhance our understanding of the key barriers to data sharing from those we are aiming to support. Look out for more details on this in the coming weeks.
We look forward to connecting with many of you in the new year and wish you a wonderful holiday season.
- The GREI Repositories