What is "Curation" in a Self-Mediated, Open Repository?: A Case Study of OSF

Gretchen Gueguen

Digital Curation is vital to the long term usability of content and the reproducibility and validity of research claims. A recent study of researchers at academic institutions by Jonston et.al in PLOS One reported: Curation actions most frequently reported include checking for duplicate files, reviewing documentation, reviewing metadata, minting persistent identifiers, and checking for corrupt/broken files. The most “value-add” curation action across generalist, institutional, and disciplinary repository respondents was related to reviewing and enhancing documentation. These activities require experienced curators collaborating with researchers to manage data, code, documentation, and other valuable research outputs. Many repositories that researchers rely on are open platforms, not tied to particular institutions. When valuable curation activities are tied to institutional data curators, how can the important research materials in these repositories be curated? And how can such activities be managed at scale when these repositories can contain vast numbers of individual datasets and other material to be curated? This paper will explore how one generalist repository, the Open Science Framework (OSF) attempted to grapple with the need for more and increasingly flexible curation of content at a very large scale in a repository free for anyone in the world to use. Through partnerships with research and education institutions, OSF investigated tools, interfaces, and services that would facilitate and increase collaboration between curatorial staff and individual researchers. The main tools developed for OSF were an institutional metrics dashboard and a new collaborator role of “curator” for OSF projects. The author will describe processes used to uncover curation needs, how potential solutions were analyzed and designed with institutional input, and will provide information on the implementation and next steps for future enhancements to the platform.