We at the depositar lab wish you a joyful Lunar New Year. We take this occasion to summarize below our works from the previous year (2025-01 – 2025-12).

Hosted Projects and Datasets

• There have been 3,257 datasets deposited and made public at the depositar, the research data repository we build and operate, by the end of Year 2025 (2025-12-31). The datasets have accumulated more than one million views.

• More than 500 projects have been hosted at the depositar by 2025 (2025-12-31).

• For more statistics and charts, please visit the depositar’s stats page.

System Upgrade and Enhancement

• The system underlining the depositar (data.depositar.io) had been upgraded six times (from v6.7.2 to v6.7.7).

• The depositar introduced a new interface based on Bootstrap 5.

• In late 2025, we made a change to the depositar so that a dataset not belonging to any project can only be edited by its uploader and collaborators.

• The depositar stats page has been released online.

• The Research Data Management Hub (RDM Hub) has been rebuilt as a static site generated by Hugo and Sveltia CMS.

Writing on Research Data Management (RDM)

• Ten new articles appeared on the RDM Hub website. Some of them were also published in Science and Technology Report 《科技報導》, appearing on the journal’s website on 2025-03-19, 2025-08-15, 2025-11-15, and 2025-12-15.

Seminar and Outreach

• In February, we are invited by the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Academia Sinica to share experience about research data management during the Institute’s weekly Geotalk event.

• In May, we gave a talk at the National Chengchi University Library on Bringing research data to life - Research Data Management x Open Science strategy.

• In July, we joined the Research Data Alliance (RDA) & International Data Week 2025 Webinar to talk about our work in Taiwan.

• In November, we joined RDA again during their Oceania and Asia Data Roundtable to share about our Data Management Plan localization project.

• In December, we co-hosted an online workshop on Open Science Tools at the invitation of Professor Chuan-Kai Lin from National Sun Yat-sen University.

• We held Research Data Management Remote Office Hour (研究資料管理線上諮詢) in December, 2025.

Presentation at International Conference

• In April, we presented Recently Orphaned Newspapers: From Archived Webpages to Reusable Datasets and Research Outlooks at the Web Archiving Conference 2025 (WAC2025) in Oslo, Norway, in the Discovery & Access (News/Newspapers) session.

• In June, we presented Automated Data Analytics: A Statistical Dashboard Built with GitLab CI/CD for a Data Repository Based on CKAN at the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025) in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

• In July, we presented a poster, Historical Vernacular Houses in the Hualien River Basin of Eastern Taiwan: A Spatial Humanities Investigation with Research Data Management Planning, at Digital Humanities 2025 (DH 2025) in Lisbon, Portugal.

• In August, we delivered the aforementioned work, Recently Orphaned Newspapers, to audiences in Taiwan at COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters), the largest gathering of its kind in Asia, under the Traditional Chinese title 〈當代的孤兒報刊：網頁保存、研究資料、以及未來展望〉.

• In September, we give a talk on Advancing Research Data Management in Southeast Asia: Gaps, Challenges, & Policy Recommendations at the PNC 2025 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, in Hanoi, Vietnam.

• In October, we delivered two presentations at the International Data Week 2025:

  • Building Sustainable Research Data Services in Taiwan: Experience from the depositar as part of the panel Research data stewardship in the Asia Pacific – What is happening now and how to move forward?
  • The Role of Data in AI for Science, presented in the AI for Science — CODATA Convened Session as well as in the Co-Designing AI Readiness: CODATA’s Call to the Global Data Community session.

Internship Students, Visiting scholars, and New Lab Member

• A total of seven internship students were received in the Summer of 2025. We organized short courses for the interns on Linux, Git, RDM, Jupyter Book, QGIS, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, among others. They also worked on short-term projects.

• In addition, the lab continues to support several students with stipends working on projects related to RDM, digital preservation, and data policies.

• Dr. Yoann Goudin (Université Lyon 3 – Jean Moulin) visited the lab in the summer working on a thematic research project funded by Academia Sinica on island soundscape.

• Dr. James X. Morris continues to visit the depositar lab. He is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for GIS, RCHSS, Academia Sinica.

• Ting-Yu Chuang joined the lab in March as an assistant engineer then departed at the end of year for a position at TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

Serving Research Data Communities

• We continue to work with Taiwan’s Long-term Social-Ecological Research Network in fostering good data management practices.

• Hilary Shiue served in the RDM Terminology Working Group of CODATA during the 2025 review cycle.

• Tyng-Ruey Chuang finished his third term in the Executive Committees of CODATA (Committee on DATA), International Science Cuncil.

• Tyng-Ruey Chuang continues to serve in CODATA Taiwan and Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility (TaiBIF) as national committee members.

• Tyng-Ruey Chuang co-chairs Academia Sinica’s Generative AI Risk Study Committee in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

We wish you all a fruitful New Year! – Ally, Cheng-Jen, Hilary, Tyng-Ruey, and Winnie.

The depositar team participated in and contributed to the International Data Week 2025 (IDW2025), held from October 13 to 16, in Brisbane, Australia. Tyng-Ruey Chuang has written a conference report in Chinese. An English conference report is forthcoming.

The 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025) was held in the City of Chicago, Illinois, USA, from June 15th to 18th, 2025. In this brief report, Tyng-Ruey Chuang outlined a few sessions in the main conference program and the depositar lab’s participation.

The venue of Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025) was at the University of Chicago Lab School nearby the campus of the University of Chicago. The main conference was held on June 16-18 while workshops were given on the 15th. Three members of the depositar lab (Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Cheng-Jen Lee, and Li Fan Wang) attended OR2025. We are thankful to the Local Host Organizing Committee for their hospitality and for arranging our accommodation at the Campus North Residential Commons, a modern facility in the heart of the UChicago campus and within walking distance to the conference venue.

The conference started with a keynote from Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC, on The Role of Open Access to Knowledge in a Challenging Political Landscape. Our presentation, on Automated Data Analytics: A Statistical Dashboard Built with GitLab CI/CD for a Data Repository Based on CKAN, was given by Ms Li Fan Wang, who is a graduate student from the National Cheng Kung University supported in part by Academia Sinica, in the Developer Track Session 2. The presentation was well received; in the Q&A session the team answered several questions from the audience.

Presentations in OR2025 are all timely and interesting. In particular, I am attracted to a presentation from the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology on Recognizing Software as a Critical Component in Open Science: Advancing an Interoperable, Community-Driven Vision for Infrastructures which is aligned with our approach in reusing and extending open source software, such as CKAN, for research data infrastructures. We also learn about new development at Figshare, Archipelago Commons, Dataverse, Fedora, Dspace, and InvenioRDM in Session 1 of Repository Showdown. We are very happy to meet a researcher from the West And Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) and to learn that, as is the case at the depositar, they also use ARK to issue persistent identifiers for datasets at BAOBAB, an Invenio-based research data repository provided by WACREN to their member institutions. The presentation from the Fedora Community on finding its future path by learning from the past and bringing others together is very inspiring.

Following the tradition of the Open Repositories conferences, the presentation materials from OR2025 can now be found in a collection at Zenodo. Previously we had presented at Open Repositories in 2015, and from 2021 to 2025. Open Repositories 2026 will be held online on June 8-11, 2026. We plan to continue our contribution to this important series of conferences on research data infrastructures.

This update was led by Ting-Yu Chuang, depositar’s Assistant Engineer, with valuable feedback and support from the depositar team throughout the transition. We invite you to explore the new RDM Hub and follow future news and updates there!

Hilary Shiue and Tyng-Ruey Chuang organized a session on Research data stewardship in the Asia Pacific – What is happening now and how to move forward? which included four presentations from research teams in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. In the session, we talked about Building Sustainable Research Data Services in Taiwan: Experience from the depositar.

With Christine Kirkpatrick (San Diego Supercomputer Center), Tyng-Ruey Chuang presented The Role of Data In AI for Science as part of AI for Science — CODATA Convened Session.

The International Data Week 2025 was organized by CODATA, World Data System, and Research Data Alliance. The four-day conference has been hosted and supported by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The conference program consisted of 107 sessions and 4 plenaries, as well as 130 posters. More than 800 delegates from 75 countries were represented.

The next edition of International Data Week (IDW 2027) will take place in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 20 to 23, 2027.

This project was presented in Open Repositories 2025. The abstract and presentation slideset are available on depositar and Zenodo.

The following sections introduce the three main pages on the depositar stats page: Dataset Statistics, Dataset Trends, and Metadata Completeness.

Dataset Statistics

This page provides a snapshot of the current status of depositar, updated daily. It features four sections:

• Distribution of Datasets: A bar chart shows the distribution of datasets across different metadata fields, along with the median, mean, and mode. For example, under the Tag tab, a chart counts the datasets by the number of tags they have. This allows users to see how many datasets contain a given number of tags.
• Frequency Distribution of Field Values Across Datasets: An area chart illustrates how datasets are spread across the values of a given metadata field. In addition, pie and bar charts highlight the top 10 field values with the most datasets. For instance, users can identify the creator with the largest number of datasets, as well as view creators ranked by their dataset counts.
• Top Datasets (By Field Value): A summary highlights the most frequently used field value in metadata fields across all datasets. For instance, it identifies the project or creator with the most datasets.
• Daily Statistics: A tabular view shows dataset status by date. Users can select a specific date, copy table content to the clipboard, or export the data in various formats.

Dataset Trends

This page illustrates how depositar’s collections vary over time. Users can select a specific time range to explore, with the default view showing trends across the past year. The page features two sections:

• Total Count Trends: An area chart shows changes in dataset statistics over time. For example, it can display the cumulative growth of dataset counts.
• Metadata Field Value Trends: A series of line charts illustrate how specific metadata field values change over time. For instance, under the Creator field, the chart shows how the number of datasets contributed by each creator changes across the selected time range.

Metadata Completeness

This page reports the metadata completeness of the datasets in depositar, according to two different levels:

• Dataset-level Metadata Completeness: A bar chart shows the metadata completion rate at the dataset level for all deposited datasets.
• Resource-level Metadata Completeness: A donut chart represents the metadata completion rate at the resource level for all deposited datasets.

The depositar team participated in and contributed to the 2025 Web Archiving Conference (WAC), held on April 9-10, 2025, in Oslo, Norway. Chia-Hsun Ally Wang wrote a detailed report in Traditional Chinese. Below is a report from Tyng-Ruey Chuang in English.

The Web Archiving Conference 2025 (WAC 2025) was held on April 9-10, 2025, in Oslo, Norway. We outline the main conference program and the depositar lab’s participation in this short report.

WAC 2025 programme and conference materials

WAC 2025 was a two-days conference following the 2025 General Assembly (GA) of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). Not being IIPC members, we didn’t take part in the IIPC GA. The WAC 2025 programme and abstracts are available online. WAC 2025 presentations had also been recorded and released on the IIPC channel at YouTube. The UNT Digital Library keeps a collection of IIPC GA and WAC presentations over the years, so materials about WAC 2025 presentations are readily available on the Web.

The conference opened with a keynote by Javier de la Rosa from the National Library of Norway on Libraries, Copyright, and Language Models, which is about the Mímir Project, a collaboration between the National Library of Norway, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The project extended the Mistral 7B Large Language Model (LLM) with a corpus drawn from books and newspapers in the library’s collections. The goal is to understand the performance of the new models as compared to the base models with respect to regional language and knowledge understanding.

We took part in the workshop Exploring Dilemmas in the Archiving of Legacy Webportals: An Exercise in Reflective Questioning, organized by the National Library of the Netherlands. The workshop posted ethical and technical questions, and engaged the participants with discussions, related to the preservation of De Digitale Stad / The Digital City, the remains of an online community in the early day of the World Wide Web, now a registered UNESCO world heritage.

Many presentations left their impressions on us. Below we can only list a few:

• Web Archives for Music Research from Royal Danish Library
• Lost, but Preserved - A Web Archiving Perspective on the Ephemeral Web from Internet Archive
• A Minimal Computing Approach for Web Archive Research from University of Victoria and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
• Using Generative AI to Interrogate the UK Government Web Archive from National Archives (UK)

We find the panel Past, Present & Future of Cross-Institutional Collaboration in Web Archiving: Insights from the Norwegian and Danish Web Archive, the NetArchiveSuite Community, & Beyond, overviewing the first 20 years of web archiving, to be informative and inspiring.

The closing keynote Quantifying Complexity: Using Web Data to Decode Online Public Debate by Håvard Lundberg and Ida Haugen-Poljac from Analysis & Numbers, an employee-owned Scandinavian cooperative, is timely and memorable.

The depositar lab’s participation

We made a presentation on Recently Orphaned Newspapers: From Archived Webpages to Reusable Datasets and Research Outlooks at the Discovery & Access (News/Newspapers) session on April 10. The presentation slideset is deposited at the depositar (ark:37281/k5p3h9k37) as well as at the UNT Digital Library (ark:67531/metadc2472454). The video recording is on YouTube.

We reported on our progress in converting a recently orphaned newspaper into accessible article collections in IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) standard representation. Specifically, we focus on Taiwan’s Apple Daily and work on the WARC files built by the Archive Team in September 2022 at a time when the future of the newspaper seemed dim. We convert these WARC files into de-duplicated collections of pure text in ninjs (News in JSON) format.

Some thoughts

The depositar lab seems to be the only team from Taiwan participating in the Web Archiving Conference series. Previously at WAC 2022, which was held as a virtual event, we made a presentation on Archiving COVID-19 Memory Websites: “COVID-19 Images and Stories” and Other Sites. We will continue our efforts in web archiving and are looking forward to further contribute to the WAC series. Memory institutions in Taiwan need to actively work on web archiving in order to preserve Taiwan’s presence on the web. Applying to IIPC to become a member, and to learn from others, will be an important step.

This webinar is part of RDA’s regional info sessions running throughout June and July. It is a great opportunity to:

• Learn more about the Research Data Alliance, a global, community-driven organization that devotes to data sharing and reuse across disciples, countries and technologies.
• Hear what’s coming up at International Data Week 2025 hosted jointly by the Committee on Data and the World Data System of the International Science Council, and the Research Data Alliance. It will take place in Brisbane, Australia during October 13–16, 2025.
• Connect with others working on open science and data sharing

We hope you can join us! If you are interested, feel free to register at this Eventbrite link.

Extended resources:

• The depositar lab has written about the 2023 International Data Week: “The Festival of Data” – taking a look at the development of research data management (This article is in Traditional Chinese.)
• The depositar lab’s poster at the 2023 International Data Week: Cultivating A Culture of Research Data Management through Bottom-up Practices of Data Management Planning
• The depositar lab’s poster at RDA 19th Plenary (2022): Advocating Good Data Practices: From Research Data Repository to Research Data Management