Frictionless Data and Dryad join forces to make it easier for scientists to upload their research data to the Dryad repository.
What’s this about?
What happens to scientific data after it is created ? Is it shared with other researchers? Or is it hidden away on a private hard drive?
This question is at the heart of the Open Science movement – which aims to make research more accessible and usable by everyone – so that advances in scientific understanding happen faster.
A great way to share research data is to upload it to a repository, but simply uploading data is not enough.
Sometimes uploaded data is not high quality. The data may have errors in it, or bits missing. Another problem is metadata – is there enough descriptive information that other researchers can also use it?
By collaborating with Dryad, the Frictionless team aimed to fix these problems – making it easier for science researchers to share their data, and drive scientific innovation faster !
Find out more about this collaboration by visiting the Frictionless Blog or contact the Frictionless team here.
What is Dryad?
Dryad is a community-led data repository that allows researchers to submit data from any field of science. The data has to be curated to ensure the quality of the data, and to make sure it has comprehensive metadata to allow reuse by other researchers. Visit the Dryad website here.
What did we achieve?
The outcome of this collaboration is a revamped upload page for the Dryad application.
Researchers uploading tabular data (CSV, XLS, XLSX) under 25MB will have the files automatically validated using the Frictionless tool. These checks are based on the built-in validation of Frictionless Framework (read the validation guide here), and include checking for data errors such as blank cells, missing headers, or incorrectly formatted data. The Frictionless report will help guide researchers on which issues should be resolved, allowing researchers to edit and re-upload files before submitting their dataset for curation and publication.
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If there’s a problem, Yo, we’ll solve it !
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Do you want to better apply open scientific methods to your research programme? Are you interested in learning how Frictionless Data can make it easier for your team to share data with people around the world?
Get in touch with the Frictionless Data Team here
Also, check out other organisations that have incorporated Frictionless data into their systems to improve their data productivity.
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This work was funded by the Sloan Foundation as part of the Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research project.
James is the Development Manager at Open Knowledge Foundation. James is passionate about developing innovative projects that deliver measurable positive impact in the world. Get in touch if you want to talk about your ideas ! @the_robot_james
