The data curation team at UNL Libraries is excited to be starting out the new year with SANDY, our new research data repository platform. SANDY’s full name is Stewarding Nebraska Data. We call it SANDY because it reminds us of Nebraska’s ecological treasure, the Sandhills, and our pledge to steward Nebraska research data with the same appreciation. Our investment in SANDY helps us promote open and transparent science by giving researchers a place to share data, whether it’s to support a publication, to comply with requirements from funders, or just for the joy of making curating data available. There are definitely some bragging rights (and career benefits) associated with depositing a neat data package. SANDY helps us share Nebraska research with the world.
SANDY has replaced the previous platform that University Libraries maintained for curated research data, UNLDR (University of Nebraska-Lincoln Data Repository). All of the data from UNLDR has been migrated into SANDY so that we can continue to care for it. TIND, the new infrastructure for SANDY will enable us to do a lot more to make sure research data is fully curated and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). It will also enable us to ensure that the repository meets evolving Federal funding agency data sharing requirements well into the future. We anticipate that the criteria for data repositories described by the National Science and Technology Council in 2022 will eventually be required by funders like NSF, NIH, and NEH. These characteristics include integrating persistent identifiers (including but not only DOIs), supporting reuse, and authenticating data depositors. This helps make sure data is not just FAIR but trustworthy. SANDY will allow us to fulfill those requirements with ease.
Of course, the technology is not enough. For research data to be FAIR, it must be curated to make sure the data are complete and well described. We are excited about the administrative features of SANDY that will make it easier to curate data and also will make better use of the metadata and identifiers (like ORCID and RRID) that we will apply to maximize the benefit of data sharing. We will use DataCite metadata and maintain DOIs so that data in SANDY can be found and cited easily and persistently.
The self-upload features for depositors are better too, with clear fields for metadata and other information we need to describe the data. Researchers will be able to track the attention their data has received over time through view and download metrics collected in SANDY. Nebraska University affiliates who are logged in will be able to access the deposit link and initiate a deposit. (They should be sure to register for an ORCID, because that is required for deposit as part of our commitment to making data FAIR.) Another benefit of SANDY: Researchers from the entire Nebraska University system can deposit research data for sharing.
We will be hosting a demo of SANDY during Love Data Week 2025, on February 14. But we are happy to assist at any time before or after. Just email datamanagement@unl.edu and we will be in touch.