By Dong Danping, Senior Librarian, Research & Data Services
SMU Libraries support two institutional repositories to support the academic and research endeavours of its community: InK and SMU Research Data Repository (RDR) with different purposes:
- InK is primarily used for publications, enabling open access and ensuring that papers are discoverable in popular academic search engines such as Google Scholar. In the long term, it helps to increase the readership of your papers and potentially get more citations.
- RDR focuses on long-term storage and accessibility of research data. Typical uses include meeting grant or journal requirements for data sharing, creating persistent identifiers (DOIs), or archive data with controlled access options (such as an embargo).
In this article, I would like to share a few less common ways to use InK and RDR that may be of interest to SMU researchers, most of these inspired by real use cases at SMU.
Use Case 1: Use InK to know your readers and demonstrate impact
Understanding who reads your research is key to measuring its reach and influence. If you are one of the authors who havefull-text papers in InK, you might already know this: InK will send you detailed readership insights in a monthly report. It includes statistics and visualizations that give a clear picture of your articles' audience. For example, you can see readership data segmented by country, type of institution (e.g. commercial, educational and governmental), and, when available, specific names of the institutions.
InK also provides another powerful tool to measure the impact of your work: Altmetrics. Unlike traditional citation-based metrics, altmetrics provide additional insights into how your work is being discussed and downloaded across platforms like news channels, social media, and repositories. These metrics accumulate much faster than citations, offering early indications of whether your papers are gaining attention. You can also consider using altmetrics to complement your citation metrics reporting.
Use Case 2: Using InK to timestamp and protect your manuscripts
A faculty member recently approached us with a challenge: he wanted to share his work-in-progress with peers for feedback before submitting it to a journal. One potential way was to upload his manuscript to a preprint server, such as SSRN or arXiv. However, these platforms require manuscripts to be publicly available and do not offer flexible options to embargo the full text while maintaining a public record.
InK, SMU's institutional repository, offers a tailored solution to this problem. When manuscripts are uploaded to InK, a timestamped record is created, and any subsequent changes are tracked within the system. Authors can also apply an embargo to the full text, and the article record can be published without full-text until the embargo period has lapsed.
In addition, authors have more rights and control over their record using InK as well as additional institutional support. Unlike platforms such as arXiv, which require authors to grant the platform an "irrevocable license to distribute the work", InK allows authors to update or even remove records when necessary. The library team can also provide a detailed record change history, which serves as evidence of authorship based on the date and time the manuscript was uploaded.
In summary, InK combines flexibility and institutional support, making it a good choice for researchers who want to timestamp and protect their preprints.
Use Case 3: User RDR to release storage spaces on your cloud drives
Many researchers take the initiative to share their data openly through platforms like GitHub. While this is commendable, platforms like GitHub have limited storage capacity and may not support large datasets. To address this, researchers often turn to cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or Baidu Drive. However, these platforms come with limitations beyond storage cost. Below is a comparison of RDR and cloud drives to help you understand the advantages of using RDR to store and share data:
| Feature | RDR | Cloud Drives |
|---|---|---|
| Link persistence | Generates a permanent DOI link that remains stable over time. | Links often break after some time when data is moved, renamed, or deleted. |
| Citations and Impact Tracking | Data usage and citations will be tracked through DOI links. | Links are not trackable, making it hard to demonstrate impact when other researchers use your data. |
| FAIR Principles Compliance | Ensures data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). | Does not inherently follow FAIR principles. |
| Storage Capacity | Supports large datasets up to 100GB (or more upon request). | Limited free storage space -- need to pay for extra space. |
| Long-Term Accessibility | Designed for long-term preservation and accessibility of research data. | Long-term accessibility is not guaranteed. |
Use Case 4: Use RDR to share data with SMU users only
Researchers sometimes may need to share or publish data selectively, either within their institution or specific groups, before releasing it to the public.
Previously, access control in RDR is for the public regardless of the identity of the person accessing your data. Now, new access configurations allow you to selectively share your data with specific audiences, such as a particular SMU School, a research center, or all logged-in SMU users. This makes RDR an ideal solution for datasets that you want to keep internal to SMU while still making the record visible to the public (which allows them to find and request access to your data).
Additionally, RDR allows you to set an embargo period, specifying a future date when your data will become publicly accessible. For example, you might choose to make your dataset available to SMU users immediately, but set it to be released to the public after two years.
Use Case 5: Use RDR to back up your Qualtrics data with a data integrity witness
Survey-based research often faces scrutiny over data integrity, particularly in ensuring that data remains unaltered throughout the research process. This topic came up in a recent discussion with an SMU faculty member, who had a unique and thoughtful solution: involving a librarian as a "data integrity witness" in his Qualtrics project.
The faculty member sought to address two key concerns:
- Ensuring Data Integrity: By inviting a librarian into his project, the faculty member aimed to keep an original record of the survey data collected with a third-party witness. This provides a transparent and verifiable trail of the data, serving as evidence that no manipulation has occurred since the project's inception.
- Facilitating Reproducibility: The librarian could back up the research data at appropriate stages on RDR, preserving its integrity and ensuring it remains accessible for long-term reproducibility.
Additionally, the librarian could assist in transferring the data to RDR and helping to create detailed metadata. This ensures that the dataset is well-documented, easily discoverable, and compliant with best practices for open and reproducible research.
Research transparency and reproducibility are increasingly recognized as a critical issue in academic research. By leveraging RDR and librarian expertise, researchers can safeguard their data, demonstrate their commitment to ethical research practices, and facilitate future reuse.
If you would like to find out more on how InK and RDR can support your research projects, reach out to us at rds@smu.edu.sg or library@smu.edu.sg.