The Association of College and Research Libraries division of the American Libraries Association (ALA) gives the Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences every two years. This summer, the re3data registry of research data repositories will be recognized with the award at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
re3data, a DataCite service, is overseen by a working group and led by Frank Scholze at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Michael Witt at Purdue University.
“Researchers are being required by funding agencies to share the data generated by grant-funded research,” Witt said. “They can search re3data to identify the best repository for them to deposit their datasets to satisfy these requirements and to increase the impact of their research by sharing their data.”
re3data has been widely adopted and is referenced in guidelines by such funders as the European Commission, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation, as well as publishers, including Nature, PeerJ, Copernicus, and the Public Library of Science.
The registry also helps students, publishers, research administrators, and librarians find research data and track the impact of data-sharing. Users can browse and search for data repositories in re3data by subjects, keywords, policies, locations, and a variety of other features.
Repositories are identified and entered into the registry by an international editorial board of librarians working toward comprehensive coverage of every discipline from repositories around the world.
“The Oberly Award is a visible recognition of the continuous work and effort of the distributed re3data team,” said Frank Scholze. “Cooperation and teamwork are at the heart of re3data, so Michael and I are glad to receive this award representative for all those who made re3data the valuable and successful service it is today.”
