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The ISPS Data Archive supports the sharing of quality data by ensuring that deposits meet certain accessibility and usability standards. Meeting these standards ultimately contributes to more reproducible science.YARD: Yale Application for Research Data
YARD (Yale Application for Research Data) is an open-source web application for reviewing and enhancing research outputs.
It enables open access to research materials that have been fully reviewed and enhanced for long-term reuse, and geared toward research output from randomized trials in the social sciences.
The software structures the data curation and code review workflow, contributing to research transparency and reproducibility.
In addition to traditional curatorial tasks, dedicated data curation staff replicate analyses and validate published results for each study before publishing the files online.
- For researchers, YARD offers a way to easily upload files for pre-publication review and seamlessly deposit them into the ISPS Data Archive and helps make sure that the research products they share are well documented and that their results are computationally reproducible.
- For data curators, YARD is a workflow tool to structure and streamline the curation and review process and to generate high quality data packages that are repository-agnostic (i.e., they can be ingested into any repository).
YARD connects researchers, curators, and publishers through a single pipeline for the purpose of improving research transparency, reproducibility, and long-term use.
At Yale, the tool as currently configured is feeding into the ISPS Data Archive and intended for the use of ISPS affiliates.
guidelines for using YARD at ISPS
Background on the YARD project
The value of shared data is linked to its usability. Sharing data that is not usable in the long term is ineffective. But how to support the preparation of research materials for replication, reproducibility, repurposing, and reuse?
This new software includes curation steps designed to improve research materials and to enable users to derive greater value from the data by performing tasks such as checking variable-level and study-level metadata, replicating code to reproduce published results, ensuring that PII is removed, and creating preservation formats. The tool is based upon the best practices of data archives and fits into repository and research workflows.
The Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) partnered with Colectica to develop a software platform that structures the curation workflow.
YARD is deployed on Yale infrastructure. Technical support is provided by Yale University Library Digital Scholarship Services, Yale Library Information Technology, and Yale Information Technology Services.
Additional materials
| 2020 | YARD: A Tool for Curating Research Outputs, Data Science Journal, 2020 (article) |
| 2019 | YARD for Data Curation and Code Review, Dataverse Community Meeting, June 2019 (slides) |
| 2019 | Reproducibility Hinges on Access to Quality Data: Presenting YARD, MZES Open Social Science Conference, January 2019 (video, slides) |
| 2018 | Announcement to the ISPS community, July 2018 (link) |
| 2018 | YARD Work: Data Archiving and Publishing at Yale, Yale Digital Conference, June 2018 (slides) |
| 2016 | The ISPS Data Archive: Mission, Work, and Some Reflections, International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology, June 2016 (slides) |
| 2015 | New Curation Software: Step-by-Step Preparation of Social Science Data and Code for Publication and Preservation, IASSIST Quarterly, Winter 2015 (article) |
| 2015 | New Curation Software: Step-by-Step Preparation of Social Science Data and Code for Publication and Preservation, International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology, June 2015 (slides) |
| 2015 | Preparing to Share Social Science Data: An Open Source, DDI-based Curation System, Research Data Alliance, March 2015 (poster) |
| 2014 | Developing Software to Prepare Social Science Research Data and Code for Sharing and Preservation, Yale Technology Summit, November, 2014 (slides) |
| 2014 | An Open Source, DDI-based Curation System for Social Science Data, Open Repositories, June 2014 (poster) |
| 2014 | An Open Source, DDI-based Curation System for Social Science Data, North America Data Documentation Initiative, April 2014 (slides) |
| 2013 | The Repository as Data (Re) User: Hand Curating for Replication, Open Repositories, June 2013 (poster) |
Questions?
For general questions about YARD open source code and how it could be adapted to feed into other archives and repositories and enhanced to integrate with other applications, contact Colectica at https://www.colectica.com/support.
For questions about the ISPS Data Archive, contact ISPS at isps@yale.edu.
For questions about YARD implementation at Yale, contact Digital Scholarship Services at digitalscholarship.services@yale.edu.