Year 2023 in Review

The year 2023 is a special year. The world started to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Old friendships are rekindled and new connections have been made. Our blog, however, has not been updated as frequently as we would like. To celebrate the Labor Day of 2024, nevertheless we at the depositar lab take this occasion to summarize below our works from the previous year (2023-01 – 2023-12).

Hosted Projects and Datasets

• Throughout 2023, a total of 463 public datasets were created or updated at least once at the depositar, the research data repository we build and operate. Of those datasets, 348 were newly created datasets and 115 were updates to existing datasets.

• About 300 projects are now hosted at the depositar.

System Upgrade and Enhancement

• The system underlining the depositar (data.depositar.io) had been upgraded six times (from v6.5.8 to v6.6.2).

• The Binder integration of the depositar with JupyterHub (and more) has been completed. We present the result at the DSWS-2023 conference in Tokyo in December.

Writing on Research Data Management (RDM)

• Seven new articles appeared on the RDM Hub website.

• Of the above, four were cross-posted on the Science Monthly website (on 2023-02-16, 2023-04-24, 2023-07-19, 2023-11-15).

• We guest posted on the Archive-It blog on Planning for Long-Term Access to COVID-19 Memory Websites on March 29th.

Seminar and Outreach

• We held a one day research data management seminar jointly with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Ecology and Sustainability (CIRES) at National Dong Hwa University on January 12, 2023.

• We gave a seminar on How Would The Future Remember? On the Sunflower Movement Archive, COVID-19 Memory, and Activist Archiving at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University on February 15, 2023.

• We gave a presentation, titled Towards An Open Repository for Research Data, at the Ministry of Digital Affairs on March 17, 2023.

• We co-hosted with Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility (TaiBIF) on two quarterly meetings to exchange the experience regarding research data repositories and research data management on April 17 and August 23, 2023.

• We collaborated with TaiBIF to host two Data Management Plan (DMP) mini-workshops. The first one was at National Sun Yat-sen University on May 13, and the second one was at Academia Sinica on September 15, 2023.

• At the invitation of Foundation of Historic City Conservation and Regeneration, on June 4, 2023 we gave a talk on Open Repositories for Landscape Documentations at a civic engagement conference on the 400th anniversary of Tainan.

• We shared our Thoughts on Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Data Management and Preservation at the Ecological Informatics Mini-Symposium on June 11, 2023, in Taipei.

• We had a meeting at the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) on June 26, 2023. In the meeting we introduced Research Data Management and the depositar service to NCHC. We also discussed issues of research data preservation.

• We held an online meeting with researchers at the National Taiwan Ocean University on issues of research data management on August 9, 2023.

• We were invited to participate in a seminar on Sunflower Movement at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy on August 24, 2023.

• We gave one presentation, titled From Data Repository to Research Data Management Practice, at the National Cheng Kung University on September 19, 2023. More than 250 participants attended the event.

• We gave a presentation on The Development and Practice of Research Data Management at the Taiwan Biodiversity Information Alliance (TBIA) meeting in Taipei on October 24, 2023.

• We gave a one-and-half-day short course on Research Data Management Planning at the National Sun Yat-sen University on November 25-26, 2023.

• We organized the 2023 Research Data Management Workshop at the Academia Sinica on December 21, 2023. The workshop included 14 speakers and more than 120 participants.

Presentation at International Conference

• We organized a session and spoke on Increased Government Access to Personal Data: Rethinking the Roles of Citizen and Private Sectors at Computers, Privacy & Data Protection (CPDP) in Brussels on May 24-26, 2023.

• We presented Persistent Identifier Practice For A Research Data Repository at Open Repositories 2023 (OR2023) in Cape Town on June 12-15, 2023 (conference report).

• We were at the International Data Week in Salzburg on October 23-26, 2023. We co-organized a session on Data Infrastructure for Smart and Sustainable Cities: Exploring Cross-Boundary Collaborations and had a poster on Cultivating A Culture of Research Data Management through Bottom-up Practices of Data Management Planning (conference report).

• We presented Research Data Repositories and Wikidata at the WikidataCon 2023 in Taipei on October 28-29.

• We were at the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) 2023 Annual Conference in Okinawa on November 3-5. We gave one presentation on On Government’s Access to Personal Data in Taiwan: Causes, Counteractions, and Remedies, co-chaired a session for data infrastructure and spoke on Looking Back and Ahead: Five Years in the Running of an Open Repository for All, and had a poster on Celebrating 5 Years of depositar – An Open Repository for FAIR Data.

• We co-chaired the Asia-Oceania Data Forum at the International Symposium on Data Science 2023 (DSWS-2023) in Tokyo on December 11-15. We gave a presentation on Toward a Reproducible Research Data Repository.

Visiting Scholars and Internship Students

• Prof. Cynthia Wang (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University) visited the lab for six months as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, starting in January, 2023. Her research, negotiating within social movements, makes use of the Sunflower Movement Archive.

• A total of eight internship students were received in the Summer of 2023. We organized short courses for the interns on QGIS, QField, OpenStreetMap, and Wikidata. They also worked on short-term projects.

• Since September, 2023, Dr. James X. Morris has been a visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at the depositar lab. Dr. Morris received his PhD degree from the International Doctoral Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, National Chengchi University, in the Summer of 2023.

Serving Research Data Communities

• We worked with the Department of Natural Sciences and Sustainable Development, National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan, in formulating a data management guideline for projects funded for data collection and sharing.

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

• The project lead of the depositar lab, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, was elected by the general assembly of CODATA (Committee on DATA), International Science Cuncil, in October 2023 to serve in its Executive Committee for a third term.

We wish you all a joyful Labor Day! – Ally, Cheng-Jen, Ming-Syuan, and Tyng-Ruey