The University of Fort Hare hosted its annual research week of excellence in the East London ICC from 10 – 13 November under the theme “ Empowering Minds and transforming communities through Research”. As part of the 4-day activities,the afternoon of the third day was dedicated to the UFH library as it launched its Figshare Repository platform and Digitization of the library services.
The university has strategically adopted the Figshare Institutional Repository to fortify its commitment to Open Science, Research Data Management (RDM), open access, and open citizenship, and the enhancement of research visibility. Figshare provides a secure, compliant, and globally recognized platform for managing, publishing, and preserving a wide range of research outputs, including datasets, figures, posters, conference presentations/ proceedings, and reports, all underpinned by the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.
This decision aligns the UFH Research Data Management Policy and Standard Operating Procedures with international open-access mandates, fulfills compliance requirements set by funding bodies and policy frameworks, and augments the discoverability of the university’s research endeavors via the integration of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and ORCID.
“The initiation of the UFH Figshare platform represents a pivotal advancement in the digital transformation trajectory. It also highlights UFH’s strategic commitment to democratizing access to knowledge, promoting ethical management of data, and enhancing the representation of African scholarship within global research forums.”, said project leader from the UFH Library, Ms. Sibongiseni Mrwashu.
It was revealed that, this was conceptualized in the period 2020-2021 but got delayed by Covid 19 pandemic, however that delay presented an opportunity to formulate a comprehensive policy regarding the management of research data and thanks to the collaborative effort of the UFH library Systems Team, , the Data Curation and Metadata Team, the ICT Services Department, Information and Research Librarians, and the Figshare Support Team from Digital Science, UK.
Said Mrwashu, about the challenges of the outgone system, “The antecedent system, predominantly manual and reliant on document-based processes, exhibited numerous limitations: an absence of structured data management workflows and DOI generation, inconsistency in metadata standards and quality, limited integration with ORCID, Scopus, and other discovery tools, reduced visibility and reuse of research data, and a lack of compliance tracking for open-access and funder mandates. These challenges impeded the University of Fort Hare’s (UFH) capacity to effectively assess research impact and advance open scholarship”.
UFH Figshare enhances the capabilities of researchers, postgraduate students, and librarians by:
- Offering a unified platform for the deposition, management, and sharing of research outputs.
- Allocating DOIs to provide each dataset with citable, permanent links.
- Increasing the visibility and global impact of UFH research.
- Assisting with data compliance in alignment with funders and institutional RDM policies.
- Bolstering the library’s role as a collaborator in the research lifecycle, encompassing data creation, dissemination, and preservation for research data visibility, and research impact
The impact is anticipated to be multifaceted, encompassing both quantitative and qualitative dimensions: an augmentation in the quantity of openly accessible research outputs originating from the UFH; an enhancement in the institution’s visibility within global repositories and citation indices; and the optimization of data curation processes, compliance monitoring, and reporting mechanisms. Furthermore, this initiative aims to cultivate a culture of open science, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and data sharing. In the long term, the repository is expected to establish itself as a benchmark for digital scholarship infrastructure among South African universities, she said.
Mrwashu assured users and contributors of the safety and security of the data that Figshare ensures enterprise-level data security by employing several robust mechanisms as it utilizes cloud-based hosting through Amazon Web Services (AWS), featuring multi-region redundancy to safeguard data integrity. The platform implements regular backups and maintains version control, thereby enhancing data reliability. Additionally, it offers multiple access control levels, including private, embargoed, and public, to regulate data accessibility. Figshare is compliant with international standards and principles such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles, and the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance. Furthermore, it provides secure Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration via DataCite, ensuring persistent and reliable data citation.
This guarantees that the research data of the University of Fort Hare (UFH) is preserved in a manner that ensures protection, authenticity, and accessibility, in accordance with both institutional and national data governance standards.
The repository is constructed upon a collaborative framework that includes the Library, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) department, Research Office, and external entities such as the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA). It facilitates opportunities for cross-institutional collaborations, enabling shared training sessions, joint curation of datasets, and seamless integration with national research infrastructures. The University of Fort Hare (UFH) intends to employ Figshare as a conduit for fostering collaboration across various departments and institutions, said Mrwashu