Rich Metadata

There are different metadata blocks. Metadata blocks are structured containers used to store and manage descriptive dataset information. These blocks adhere to specific schema definitions and provide essential context for understanding and utilizing data assets. We will divide these blocks intro three:

• Citation: this block is set by default and contains any metadata that would be needed for generating a data citation and other general metadata that could be applied to any dataset. You can check the list of fields here.
• Domain-specific: this block contains metadata fields with specific support currently for Social Science and Humanities, Life Science, Geospatial, Journal, and Astronomy and Astrophysics datasets.

As a Streward, your responsibility in each block is:

Citation metadata

All mandatory fields are correctly filled:

• Title: The main title of the dataset (please, check there are no typos)
• Author: Make sure that the person(s) added to this section is the one that holds the intellectual property of the data.
  • Name: Make sure the name is filled following the structure “Surname(s), Name”
  • Affiliation: Make sure the affiliation name is filled following the structure “Full name (acronym) [e.g. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)]”
• Point of Contact: The entity e.g. a person or organization, that users of the dataset can contact with questions
• E-mail: It can be institutional email (preferred), but we could also accept generic email accounts
• Description > Text: A summary describing the purpose, nature, and scope of the Dataset, as well as the data types, file formats.
• Subject: The area of study relevant to the Dataset.

If you would like to add a new option, contact the Data Management team

Non-mandatory but nice-to-have fields:

• Related Publications: Any publication in this section related to articles published as a result of the research where the registered dataset was used.
• Related Materials: Any non-data materials (e.g. surveys, appendices, other documents), related to the registered dataset.
• Related Datasets: Any data material (e.g. other datasets from Dataverse or other repositories) related to the registered dataset.
  
  

All the other non-mandatory fields are completely options, although always highly recommended when suitable. For example, for example, any dataset related to a software, it would be needed to add both, Software name and version.

Domain-specific metadata

It is up to each user to decide how and when they want to use any of the domain specific metadata blocks. However, each Steward should always recommend and encourage users to add as much metadata as possible and use domain-specific metadata blocks if applicable.