About

Mission

The mission of the Data Depot Repository (DDR) is to provide data producers with an open repository to safely store, share, and curate natural hazards research data, ensuring its permanent publication, distribution, and impact evaluation. DDR enables users to discover, search, access, and reuse data, thereby accelerating research discoveries. DDR is a component of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure which represents a comprehensive open science research environment that provides cloud-based tools to manage, analyze, understand, and publish critical data to understand the impacts of natural hazards. DesignSafe is part of the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI), and aligns with its mission to provide the natural hazards research community with open access, shared resources aimed at supporting civil and social infrastructures prior to, during, and following natural disasters.

History

Founded in 2016, the DDR was established as an open-access data repository. Supported by the National Science Foundation, it preserves and provides access to natural hazards research data including legacy datasets dating back to 2005 generated under the NSF-supported Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), the predecessor to NHERI. Since 2020 DDR is a Core Trust Seal Certified Data Repository ensuring the sustainability and trustworthiness of its infrastructure and the data it preserves.

Governance

DDR governance aims to ensure effective and secure data curation and publication in compliance with relevant regulations and best practices, supporting the discovery, access, preservation and reuse of critical research data. Governance is managed by the DesignSafe management team, which is responsible for setting and updating policies, recommending best practices, overseeing technical development, and prioritizing key activities and services encompassing datasets, systems, and processes associated with the DDR. All activities are driven by the research community of practice operationalized by the NHERI network, and informed by digital library standards. The broad organizational structure under which the DDR operates is here.

An Advisory Board provides strategic guidance and feedback on DesignSafe's initiatives and activities. Established with 7 members representing the broader natural hazards community, the board holds bi-annual meetings and helps shape the DDR's direction, ensuring it meets the evolving needs and challenges of the natural hazards community. More information on the board can be found here.

Formal mechanisms are in place for external evaluators to gather feedback and conduct structured assessments in the form of usability studies and yearly user surveys. To ensure that the repository is meeting the community’s needs there are different feedback mechanisms for users to provide input and suggest enhancements, and processes in place for evaluation of those requests and implementation of updates. All DDR activities are reported to the National Science Foundation on a quarterly and annual basis in terms of quantitative and qualitative progress.

Infrastructure

DesignSafe including DDR are hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center(TACC)at the University of Texas at Austin. TACC provides access to high performance computing, visualization, and large scale data analysis computational resources, as well as to reliable large scale data management and storage solutions. Cloud and portal services further increase the ways in which users can access data and computational resources to advance their work.

Repository Team

An interdisciplinary repository team carries out ongoing design, development, and day-to-day operations of the DDR. The team gathers requirements and discusses solutions through bi-monthly meetings with members of the DesignSafe management team as well as with members of the NHERI network to meet the requirements and commitments of their distinct research focus and functions. To track development the DDR curator meets every other week with the DesignSafe PI and with the head of the development team. Based on these fluid communications, the team designs functionalities, researches and develops best-practices, and implements agreed-upon solutions. The figure below shows the current formation of the repository team.

Data Depot Team

Community of Practice

The DDR serves the natural hazards research community, both data producers and consumers. This research community includes primarely the facilities that make up the NHERI network, for which the DDR is the designated data repository. In addition DDR welcomes data produced in other national and international facilities and organizations. At large, the repository serves a broad national and international audience of natural hazard researchers, students, practitioners, policy makers, as well as the general public. By providing access to a broad range of natural hazards data, DDR aims to support and accelerate research, education, and informed decision-making on a global scale.

Community Norms

The following set of Community Norms encompassing DDR's Policies and Best Practices inform the conditions of usage of the DDR.

  • Users of DDR must abide by the TACC Acceptable Use Policy and the DesignSafe-CI Terms of Use .
  • Users agree to publish open-access data, this is data that is freely available for anyone to use.
  • Datasets and other resources should be published in a manner that does not hinder the ability of other users to reuse data or reproduce research by following the Curation and Publication Best Practices.
  • Users publishing human subjects data should abide by our Protected Data Policies which can be implemented following the Protected Data Best Practices.
  • Users publishing data agree to provide the type of license needed to make data available for archiving and for reuse by others.
  • Users understand that their data submissions to the DDR should accept the Data Publication Agreement.
  • Users accessing and using DDR data agree to the Data Usage Agreement.
  • Users agree to use DDR datasets in ways that respect the licenses established in the publications.
  • Users agree to properly cite the datasets they use in their works in accordance with the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles by using the citations provided in the published datasets landing pages.
  • Publications that do not fall within these norms may be removed according to the Tombstone Policy.
  • Using DDR to publish data is entirely voluntary. None of these terms supersede any prior contractual obligations to confidentiality or proprietary information the user may have with third parties; thus, the user is entirely responsible for what they upload or share with DDR.
  • We reserve the right to ask users to suspend their use of DDR should we receive complaints or note violations of these Community Norms.