These recommendations were last updated on June 15, 2020
Around the world, research related to COVID-19 is being undertaken at unprecedented rates and rapid sharing of early research outputs at the international level is critically important. Many governments and funders are requiring immediate open access to COVID-19 outputs in the form of preprints, data and so on. With over 5,000 repositories around the world providing open access to data, articles, pre-prints and other valuable products of research, the international repository network represents critical research infrastructure. A coordinated and interoperability approach across repositories will to ensure that COVID-19 resources are widely available and discoverable.
Repositories
- Work with your local communities to collect any COVID-19 or other related research outputs in your local, disciplinary, or national repository (see subject headings)
- Ensure basic recommended metadata and tagging of COVID-19 resources (see basic metadata recommendations below)
- Ensure your repository is being harvested by national and/or international aggregators
Repository networks
- Form a community of practice to help curate the metadata of relevant resources in national and regional aggregations
- Communicate and promote for the deposit of COVID-19 resources with other national and regional funders, governments, and university administrators
- Recommend the use of common, interoperable metadata schemas for metadata in your country or region
- Ensure national aggregations are being harvested by other networks so your content are discoverable
Basic recommended metadata elements
Some regions and disciplines already have more comprehensive metadata requirements in place for their funded research. In order to support discovery, reuse, and confidence, COAR is recommending, as a basic minimum, the following metadata for COVID-19 resources in repositories (and other types of platforms):
- Title, creator, date
- ORCID ID
- Keyword tag in subject: COVID-19
- Resource Type: COAR Resource Type Vocabulary (Version 2.0)
- Version Type: COAR Controlled Vocabularies, Draft V1
- CC license (CC0, CC-BY)
- Institutional affiliation, e.g. ROR (In “dc.description.sponsorship” or “dc:contributor” field)
- if applicable – Funder name or ID, e.g. FundRef (In “Funding Reference” or “dc.description.sponsorship” or “dc:contributor” field)
- if applicable – Grant or project name/number (In “Funding Reference” or “dc.description.sponsorship” or “dc:contributor” field)
For those who do not have access to a repository, deposit your research results into Zenodo, arXiv, or another appropriate open repository.
