In a bid to increase the level of compliance with the open access policy, IITA has allocated resources to help capture and optimize historical research data for storage in open access repositories. To achieve this, IITA is embarking on a data sprint challenge for scientists who have data from the 1990s to 2018 to get them uploaded on the CKAN data repository.
According to IITA Institutional Data Manager, Olatunbosun Obileye, the purpose of the exercise is to get our datasets that are yet to be stored in open access repositories ready and available to the public. He said, “Research data from our scientists are precious IITA assets and it is expected that after the embargo period they should be accessible to the public, especially those that the donors expect to be open access.”
The data sprint is about making research data available and will last for three months from 1 July to 30 September 2018. Researchers are expected to send their datasets to the CKAN officer (iita-ckan@ cgiar.org). The open data team supports the researchers in completing the metadata form and ensuring it meets the CG Core metadata schema standards. The curated data is ensured fit for upload and finally uploaded to CKAN.
The goal of the data sprint is to have at least 100 quality-checked datasets that have both data and metadata annotated with ontology and uploaded onto CKAN by 30 September. This will be facilitated by incentives to both individuals and hubs with the most dataset uploads.
Winners will receive awards which include mini grants to attend a scientific conference or the Big Data Convention in Nairobi. For more details on #IITADataSprint2018 visit http://www.iita.org/data-sprint/ or contact Olatunbosun Obileye (o.obileye@cgiar.org) or Tonny Omwansa (t.omwansa@cgiar.org).
