From a CDLINFO News Announcement:
The University of California’s Digital Library (CDL) and its partners today (Oct. 2) launched DataUp, a free data management tool.
Researchers struggling to meet new data management requirements from funders, journals and their own institutions now can use the DataUp Web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data.
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The DataUp add-in operates within a program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The Web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the add-in and the Web application allow users to:
- Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized
- Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template
- Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository
- Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.
Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.
Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they are useless without proper documentation and long-term storage. Data sharing also is strongly encouraged in the scientific community but is not the norm in many disciplines, including Earth, ecological and environmental sciences. DataUp addresses these issues.
CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections and DataONE to create the DataUp tool, which is free to use and creates a direct link between researchers and data repositories. CDL also announces today that the DataUp project has been contributed to the Outercurve Foundation’s Research Accelerator Gallery.
Read the Complete Announcement
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