Announcing The Dash Tool: Data Sharing Made Easy
We are pleased to announce the launch of Dash – a new self-service tool from the UC Curation Center (UC3) and partners that allows researchers to describe, upload, and share their research data. Dash helps researchers perform the following tasks:
- Prepare data for curation by reviewing best practice guidance for the creation or acquisition of digital research data.
- Select data for curation through local file browse or drag-and-drop operation.
- Describe data in terms of the DataCite metadata schema.
- Identify data with a persistent digital object identifier (DOI) for permanent citation and discovery.
- Preserve, manage, and share data by uploading to a public Merritt repository collection.
- Discover and retrieve data through faceted search and browse.
Who can use Dash?
There are multiple instances of the Dash tool that all have similar functions, look, and feel. We took this approach because our UC campus partners were interested in their Dash tool having local branding (read more). It also allows us to create new Dash instances for projects or partnerships outside of the UC (e.g., DataONE Dash and our Site Descriptors project).
Researchers at UC Merced, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, or UCOP can use their campus-specific Dash instance:
- UC Berkeley Dash: dash.berkeley.edu
- UC Irvine Dash: dash.lib.uci.edu
- UCLA Dash: dash.ucla.edu
- UC Merced Dash: dash.ucmerced.edu
- UCOP Dash: dash.ucop.edu
Other researchers can use DataONE Dash (oneshare.cdlib.org). This instance is available to anyone, free of charge. Use your Google credentials to deposit data.
Note: Data deposited into any Dash instance is visible throughout all of Dash. For example, if you are a UC Merced researcher and use dash.ucmerced.edu to deposit data, your dataset will appear in search results for individuals looking for data via any of the Dash instances, regardless of campus affiliation.
See the Users Guide to get started using Dash.
Stay connected to the Dash project:
- Facebook: /UC3Dash
- Twitter: @UC3Dash
- Google+
- Data Pub blog (Post Category “Dash”): announcements and progress reports
- Dash Listserv (email us to be added)
- GitHub website: project site with links to code, documentation
- GitHub issue tracker: log bugs, enhancement requests
Dash Origins
The Dash project began as DataShare, a collaboration among UC3, the University of California San Francisco Library and Center for Knowledge Management (http://www.library.ucsf.edu/about/ckm), and the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). CTSI is part of the Clinical and Translational Science Award program funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health (Grant Number UL1 TR000004).