Bryan Gee
Open Research Coordinator for Data and Software
University of Texas at Austin
Michael Shensky
Head of Research Data Services
University of Texas at Austin
The growing interest in open scholarship initiatives and policies by governments, funding agencies, academic advocacy organizations, and publishers is driving an increased emphasis on the proper management, dissemination, and recognition of research outputs beyond the primary article, such as datasets and software. A proper understanding of the ecosystem of scholarly objects across various organizational scales (e.g., within an institution vs. within a department) requires a holistic approach to identify the entire corpus of scholarly outputs and to characterize the various ways in which they are connected. The session presents work being conducted at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) to develop scripted processes for gathering information about research datasets and open source software published by members of the campus community. These outputs have historically been under-recognized and more difficult to track than articles published by university-affiliated researchers. A primary motivation of this work is to identify connections between different types of research outputs in order to acquire a more comprehensive view of the research ecosystem at our institution. This presentation discusses the integration of a wide range of digital repository and platform APIs in a scalable process that can be used for on-demand discovery and analysis of these objects. The methodology can be applied across systems of varying architecture, specificity, and connectivity that are used for publishing research outputs. The session will also highlight how the data informs the strategies developed by the UT Libraries and UT Open Source Program Office for providing research data and software services to the university community.
https://github.com/utlibraries/research-data-discovery
https://github.com/UT-OSPO/institutional-innovation-grapher