Facilitating the Deposit of Experimental Chemistry Data in Institutional Repositories: Project SPECTRa

Abstract

Institutional Open Access repositories are becoming established as an important part of the university library and information services infrastructure. While early efforts to populate them with content have concentrated on the deposit of peer-reviewed research papers, there is a growing awareness of their potential as repositories of data and other non-text materials, and consequently a need to develop strategies and procedures that can realise this potential.

Chemistry as a discipline has been slower than the physical and biomedical sciences to adopt and exploit Open Access concepts in the handling of experimental data and research publications. Chemical information is essential to many sciences outside chemistry, and the reporting of the synthesis and properties of new chemical compounds is central to this. But most of the essential experimental data associated with peer-reviewed publications from chemistry departments are never communicated to the scientific community. These data are all available in high-quality electronic form in the laboratories but there is no effective method for archiving them or making them openly accessible.

The SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation, and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data) project addressed this problem. It was a JISC-funded 18-month collaboration, ending in March 2007, between the university libraries and chemistry departments of the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, in co-operation with the eBank-UK project. Its main objective was to develop a set of customized software tools that would enable chemists routinely to deposit experimental data in Open Access repositories, employing the DSpace repository platform used by the two libraries. The work was informed by surveys of research chemists in the two universities, exploring their use of information technology and assessing their interest in using repositories and Open Access principles for data management.

This paper presents the project's outcomes and discusses the implications for the development of library-managed institutional repositories.