Blog post written by Adrian Clark and Andrew Mckenna-Foster, Figshare product specialists.
Today, we’re diving deeper into how Figshare can not only help you manage and optimize costs associated with your research data, but also where establishing effective deposit policies and guidelines within your institutional repository can help provide a framework for what and where to publish to your repository.
Storage choice
Figshare provides tools to optimize storage, upload files up to 5TB, manage access, and control costs:
- Storage Choice: Figshare customers can choose either Figshare provided AWS S3 cloud storage for scalable, reliable, and cost-effective storage solutions, or Figshare can integrate with an institution’s own compatible storage.
- Ingress and Egress Efficiency: If choosing Figshare provisioned storage, we offer buckets of cloud compute (that’s ingress, egress, viewers and storage). That’s one budget line to cover anticipated yearly usage, this can be increased or decreased.
Features to manage large files
- Disable downloads: A feature in Figshare that enables depositors to prevent an item from being downloaded. While not ideal in terms of access, the metadata and preview are available to end users; this can help with concerns around unpredictable egress costs of large files. An example of a Figshare item that has had download disabled is available here: https://doi.org/10.57831/24210828
- Metadata only records: If it’s appropriate to describe an item without adding the file, Figshare offers the ability to create a metadata only record.
- Link out: Similar to a metadata only record, but provide the option to link where a file is hosted elsewhere.
Establishing Deposit Policies and Frameworks
There are a number of policies that institutions have to comply with, these often determine the what, why, and how related to depositing research, but often the where can be a little more complicated, even more so for non-mandated deposits.
Below we give three strata of policy and how they affect the decisions made about sharing research, which to varying degrees affects the associated cost of storing those outputs.
Funder/publisher compliance policies
Funders, publishers and organisations have different approaches to deposit requirements. These can differ by region, discipline or mission. Examples could be UKRI, NIH/OSTP, Springer, or Plan S. Essentially, if you are at an institution that any or all of the above apply to, whatever the deposit requirements for each of those entities is, must be satisfied. This can be considered the minimum baseline of storage requirement for an institution to operate within its required and desired context.
Institutional Open Research policies
Each institution has a different set of aims as to how they will achieve their open research goals, very commonly this is articulated in an open research or open access policy. These policies often set out how an organisation will both achieve its mandatory requirements, and often articulate additional goals that an institution sets for itself; this may include self-imposed obligatory deposits, for example this could be special collection requirements, or how an organisation will host and disseminate non-traditional research outputs. Again, these create a set of requirements that will ultimately impact on the amount of items stored on a repository.
Individual repository policies
At the repository level, policies enable guidance for researchers. They are informed by the limitations, intersections with other systems and capabilities of the institutional repository in relation to the culture of an organisation and its available budget. One thing a policy governing the use and deposit workflows of a repository has to account for is very simply, what should be on the repository and what should not be? While mandated outputs will be captured by such policies, there is also a selection element to what is appropriate to deposit. A key and growing area for consideration is large file sizes. What a large file is, will differ from institution to institution, but it’s almost a universal consideration. Above, we have listed some of the technical features in Figshare that can help, but upstream of the repository is where a well written policy can help, based on a review of policies and conversations with our customers we have found the following to be impactful:
- Researchers often overestimate the storage space they will need.
- Not everything a researcher has generated as part of conducting their research needs to be deposited in the institutional repository. Articulate this and provide guidance for discriminating between depositable and non-depositable entities.
- Not everything that should be deposited needs a file on the institutional repository. Provide pathways for items that may need to be stored elsewhere, this could include on specialist repositories, national infrastructure or internal storage.
- Be pragmatic, sometimes limiting access either partially or wholly is the only option available to you, this can often come down to cost, but there are other reasons you may wish to not accept large files for deposit. Be clear about this in your policy, record when this happens, and use this evidence base to advocate for solutions from all stakeholders.
Conclusion
Figshare can help to connect the world with your research, and we provide features and functionality to do that. A robust, well thought through repository policy can provide clarity for your researchers and help inform workflows that make your research management efficient and sustainable.
