DAIS - Digital Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: General information

From TRAP-RCUB

This public wiki is about the DAIS – Digital Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

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What is DAIS?

DAIS – Digital Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts is the institutional repository of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) and institutes under its auspices. It is an archive of born-digital and digitized resources created by SASA and its institutes since the 1840s until today.

DAIS was established in 2017. It is funded by SASA and is developed, hosted and maintained by the University of Belgrade Computer Centre (RCUB) according to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between SASA and RCUB (a brief outline of SLA).

DAIS has multiple functions:

  • It serves as the archive of the participating institutions’ heritage (publications, research data, etc.);
  • It ensures long-term preservation of publications and other types of research outputs;
  • It serves as a dissemination tool and a data provider for multiple aggregators;
  • It is a data source for further research;
  • It ensures compliance with national, institutional and funder Open Access policies and FAIR principles.

Content policy and organization

The repository content covers various areas of research: linguistics, history, musicology, ethnology, social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, sociology, mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, medical and biomedical sciences, and especially broad multidisciplinary areas such as Slavic Studies, Balkan Studies and Byzantine Studies. The following content categories are considered eligible for inclusion in DAIS:

  • publications published by SASA and its institutes, current and historical, born-digital and digitized;
  • publications authored by SASA members and the staff of SASA institutes;
  • research data and any other research outputs resulting from research projects implemented by SASA and SASA institutes.

Submissions that are not in line with the Content policy will not be accepted. The content is organized into communities and collections: each participating institution has its own community and a number of sub-communities and collections. In case a resource should belong to multiple collections (e.g. a book co-published by two participating institutions), it will still be deposited only once and will be mapped into other collections. SASA members and the staff of SASA institutes may also deposit their research outputs created before joining SASA/institute, if they wish.

The content is multilingual (about 15 languages, with Serbian and English prevailing). For most items, basic English-language metadata are provided along with the metadata in the publication language.

DSpace provides an administrative tool for managing community structure. Every community in DSpace can be either a 'parent' community‚ which has at least one sub-community, or a 'child' community (a sub-community of another community). Each bottom-level community should contain one or more collections. The community and collection tree can be found here.

Organization scheme can be found here.

Software and standards

The repository uses a DSpace-based (DSpace 5.10) software platform developed and maintained by the Belgrade University Computer Centre (RCUB). It is compliant with the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories v3.

The metadata conform to the Qualified Dublin Core Schema and are exposed via the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Interoperability and integrations

DAIS is onboarded to the NI4OS-Europe Service Catalogue], a catalogue that includes core, generic and thematic services, as well as repositories developed in 15 countries of Southeast Europe. In order to be included in the catalogue, services had to meet requirements aligned with the EOSC Rules of Paticipation. The services included in the NI4OS-Europe digital service catalogue will be eventually integrated into the EOSC Portal Catalogue & Mrketplace.

Users

Who may use DAIS?

DAIS is a publicly available repository. Everybody can access, browse and search, export and harvest metadata. However some deposited items (publications, posters, images, research data, etc.) are not publicly available due to copyright and other restrictions.

In order to deposit in DAIS and have access to restricted content, one has to be affiliated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts or one of SASA institutes and have a registered account and appropriate permissions grated by a repository manager. In some cases, the right to submit content to DAIS and access restricted content may be granted to academics and researchers not affiliated with SASA and its institutes.

The Designated community of DAIS includes two user groups:

  • Internal users: members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, SASA research support staff, and the researchers and research support staff of SASA institutes. They include scholars from a wide range of research disciplines: STEM, social sciences and humanities. The internal users qualify for the status of registered users and can deposit their research outputs in the repository, browse, search and export the metadata, and, in most cases, download data files (bitstreams) from repository collections. Internal users are the primary Designated community and the repository has multiple functions for them (long-term archiving of research outputs, compliance with funder policies, dissemination tool, data source for further research).
  • Associates, i.e. local and international professional researchers who have joint projects with internal users. They can browse, search and export the metadata, download public content (both Open Access and free-to-read) from the repository, access the collection dedicated to their project and, if granted appropriate permissions, deposit in this collection.

All the other users, such as local and international professional researchers, citizen scientists, teachers, students, informed citizens, and the general audience with the access to the Internet and basic information retrieval skills, can browse, search and export the metadata, and download the OA content from the repository. For them, DAIS is a valuable source of information that can be used in their professional activities and education. They may submit a request to access restricted content. However, access requests are resolved at the discretion of the content owner, in line with copyright, data protection and other relevant legislation.

Who may deposit?

In order to deposit content in the repository, one must be affiliated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) or one of the research institutes under the auspices of SASA and have valid credentials. The credentials will be assigned by a repository manager upon registration.

Submission guidelines are provided in the Serbian language. All submissions must be approved by a repository manager.

Content

In order to be deposited, content must be in a digital format and in a completed state (not a dynamic document). If changes need to be made, then the changed electronic document shall be deposited as a new document.

Ccontent that is not in line with the Content policy will not be accepted.

Supported content types

  • publications;
  • including preprints;
  • dissertations;
  • masters and undergraduate theses;
  • working papers and technical reports;
  • white papers and reports;
  • datasets;
  • conference presentations;
  • conference posters;
  • course-based publications and training materials;
  • images;
  • audio and video recordings.

This is not an exhaustive list. Contact us if you have any questions about materials.

Preferred file formats

The Repository supports a wide range of file formats. Currently, deposited files can be either downloaded or previewed in the browser (no additional viewers for specific file formats are integrated in the platform). It is usually indicated when a specific software tool that is not generally used is needed to open the files. Users are strongly advised to use preferred formats suitable for long-term preservation. A limited number of non-preferred formats will be accepted.

Resource type Preferred formats Accepted formats
Text documents
  • PDF other than PDF/A (.pdf)
Plain text
  • Unicode text (.txt)||
Spreadsheets
Databases HDF5 (.hdf5, .he5, .h5)
Statistical data
  • SPSS (.dat/.sps)
Raster images
  • JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg) - only if camera originals are JPEGs
  • TIFF (.tif, .tiff) - proprietary, but fully documented and widely used
  • PNG (.png)
  • JPEG 2000 (.jp2)
Vector images
  • SVG (.svg)
Crystallographic data
Audio
  • BWF (.bwf)
  • MXF (.mxf)
  • Matroska (.mka)
  • FLAC (.flac)
  • OPUS
  • WAVE (.wav)
  • MP3 (.mp3)
Video
  • Matroska (.mkv)
  • MPEG-4 (.mp4, .m4a, .m4v) - if this is camera's output format
Markup language
Packages

Although all formats can be deposited in DSpace, it is highly recommended to use formats that are open and sustainable. In case of digital images and multimedia files, lossless file formats are recommended but there are situations when due to large file sizes compromise can be made with the aim of ensuring widest possible access.

Along with the preferred PDF/A format, other PDF variants are currently accepted. These files require conversion, which will be performed in a later stage.

In general, if a non-preferred data file is submitted to the repository, when reviewing the submission, a repository manager will contact the depositor and suggest converting the data file into a compatible preferred format. Poorly documented proprietary or custom formats may be used only exceptionally, when it is not possible to convert files to an open format without compromising data integrity, or in case a data file has already been published in a non-preferred format (e.g. in a journal as supplementary information) and it is important for the primary designated community to preserve it in the repository as it is. Efforts are made to limit such cases as much as possible.

DAIS has the right to convert the submitted data file into any medium or format for the purpose of preservation. In this case, the original data file will be preserved in the repository.

File names

File names should contaion only Latin alphanumeric characters without special characters such as quotes, punctuation marks, characters with diacritics, spaces, slashes and the like. Underscores (_) and hyphens (-) can be used. File names should not contain characters in non-Latin alphabets.

Browsing and searching

DAIS supports browsing (using the collection tree and filters on sidebar facets) and searching. This functionality relies on the DSpace Discovery module.

Both basic and advanced search are enabled. Apart from metadata, the search index includes the full text of readable text documents. It is possible to search the entire repository and each collection separately.

Additional options for browsing and searching are enabled through the application Authors, Projects, Publications (APP), which makes it possible to browse and search normalized author and funding data and to browse publications by communities and collections.

As the default DSpace search feature does not entirely meet user expectations, some actions have been taken to improve search efficiency:

  • Users expect to be able to find an author or a Serbian-language title no matter whether they search using the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet. To enable this, an automated maintenance operation has been developed which converts Cyrillic author names and titles in metadata fields into Latin and vice versa. The converted metadata are stored in custom fields, which are included in the search index but are not publicly visible.
  • The external application Ellena enables repository managers to assign unique keys (preferably ORCIDs) to different versions of author names, which significantly increases their findability.

Rights

By depositing their work, depositors agree to give to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and/or its institutes only the non-exclusive right to disseminate and preserve the content. Depositing does not involve copyright transfer: copyright holders retain their rights.

If the deposited content has already been published, copyright terms and other legal restrictions, such as publishers’ embargo periods, must be respected. To check publishers’ self-archiving policies for journal articles one may use SHERPA/ROMEO. As far as monographs and edited volumes are concerned, where self-archiving policies are not always transparent, this shared community resource may provide valuable information. Any copyright violations are entirely the responsibility of depositors.

In case a contributor deposits a preprint, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and/or its institutes do not preclude subsequent publishing of the document in a journal, monograph, or in other repositories. However, depositors should check publishers' policies on prior or parallel publication, as some publishers do not accept manuscripts that have been published as preprints. To do this, one may use SHERPA/ROMEO.

Depositors must have the necessary rights to submit a resource in the repository and they must clear possible copyright, privacy, data protection and other issues with their institutions, collaborators, funders and all relevant stakeholders. This is controlled by each participating institution: repository managers, who are members of participating institutions' staff, check for possible copyright and licensing issues related to deposited items in the process of approving deposits. If the the information provided by contributors is insufficient or unclear, the repository manager will request additional information and will not approve the submission until the status of the submission is cleared. Any violations or malpractice are entirely the responsibility of depositors.

In case non-compliance with license conditions or terms of use by a registered user is identified, the repository manager will try to rectify the situation through communication with the user. If misuse is repeated, such a user may be denied further access to the repository. As the last resort, legal action can be taken. In case Open Access content is used and distributed in breach of the license (e.g. distributed commercially despite a non-commercial license), it may be impossible to identify the user involved in license infringement. In such cases, reasonable measures, including legal action, will be taken to stop and mitigate unauthorized content distribution.

Sensitive data

The repository currently does not contain sensitive data. DAIS currently focuses on the materials that are or can eventually be made publicly available. The institutions using the repository are still in the process of developing their data policies, and the Designated Community is not expected to deposit sensitive data until the policies are fully defined (3-5 years). However, a procedure for handling potentially sensitive data is in place; the software platform fully supports sophisticated access control (by defining users or user groups who can access data at the bitstream level), and the repository managers, who are employed by the participating institutions, are trained and authorized to prevent sensitive data from becoming exposed or compromised.

Access and licences

From the perspective of end users, each repository entry consists of data files (preferably one per item) and metadata. Different access and reuse policies apply to metadata and data files.

DAIS provides various levels of access:

  • Public access to both metadata and content files: metadata can be viewed and content files can be directly downloaded from the Repository;
  • Public access to metadata only: metadata can be viewed; further information may be accessed by inquiring;
  • Internal users have access to both metadata and content files: metadata can be viewed and content files can be downloaded from the repository after authentication;
  • Associates have access to the metadata and content files belonging to a specific collection: specified and authenticated project members can view metadata and download content files.

Although the greatest part of the content files are either Open Access or free-to-read (about 90%), some items must remain restricted due to copyright and other legal limitations. For the same reason, some items will be publicly available only after the expiration of an embargo period imposed by the publisher. Public availability of an item is indicated by a prominent orange Open Access logo on the item's landing page.

The metadata are freely accessible to all, and freely reusable by all, under the terms of the CC0 licence. At the same time, each item (content file) is individually tagged with appropriate licence. DAIS currently supports Creative Commons licences (all modules, version 4.0) for Open Access content. All rights reserved is available as an option for restricted content. In case such a need arises, other types of licences (e.g. software licences) may be integrated in the repository.

The licence assigned to a repository item is clearly indicated on the item's landing page using an interactive licence icon that links to the licence page.

Is it possible to gain access to restricted content?

Users who are not affiliated with SASA or its institutes will not be able to access the full text of some publications in the repository, or data, images, etc.

A request to access restricted content may be submitted through the feedback form. However, access requests are resolved at the discretion of the content owner, in line with copyright, data protection, and other relevant legislation. In case access is granted, it will be enabled beyond the scope of repository, subject to a separate agreement by the user and the content owner.

Citing data

Users are requred to acknowledge and cite data sources in all publications and outputs in line with the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles. All items in DAIS are supplied with unique and persistent Handle identifiers, i.e. permanent identifiers in the form of URLs that will always point to data landing pages. In case an item has other persistent identifiers (such as DOI), they will also be included in the metadata.

It is highly recommended to use a persistent identifier when citing data in publications, websites. etc. If you wish to cite a publication that has both a DOI and a Handle assigned by the repository, give priority to DOI. In all other cases, use the Handles.

Recommended citations in several citaiton formats (APA, Vancouver, Chicago) are available on each item landing page. They can easily be copied and pasted.

Two export formats (BibTeX and RIS) are also available on item landing pages. Massive metadata export in these two formats is enabled through the external application Authors, Projects, Publications (APP). Exported metadata can easily be imported into reference management tools. Each item landing page is supplied with metadata in the Dublin Core format embedded in HTML meta tags, which is easily extracted by reference management tools.

Privacy

Whenever a user visits the repository, certain information is gathered and stored automatically. This information does not generally identify the user personally. Information that is automatically collected and stored when visiting the repository site includes:

  • the Internet domain and IP address from which the repository was accessed;
  • the type of browser and operating system;
  • date and time;
  • pages visited.

This automatically collected information is only used internally for technical troubleshooting, to improve the usability of the repository, and to record aggregate statistics. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are used to analyze the use of this repository. Google Analytics generates statistical and other information about the repository use by means of cookies, which are stored on users' computers. The information generated relating to the repository is used to create reports about its use. Google will store and use this information in line with the Google Privacy Policy.

Personal information submitted by users

The system collects personal information (name, e-mail, IP address) submitted during the registration and deposit process. Submitted information will be used only for the purpose for which you submitted it, and will not be shared with third parties or used for commercial purposes.

Other registered users do not have access to the personal information of other users. It is only available to repository managers. The information contained in the field dc.description.provenance, which contains users' names and e-mails, is available only to repository managers. This field is not visible to registered users and the general public.

Usage metrics

DSpace is equipped with a SOLR-based infrastructure to log and display pageviews and file downloads. In DAIS, DSpace usage statistics data are publicly available at the item, collection and community levels. Usage Statistics pages show:

  • Total page visits (all time);
  • Total Visits per Month;
  • File Downloads (all time), item-level; file download information is captured even when the bitstream was downloaded from a direct link on an external website;
  • Top Country Views (all time);
  • Top City Views (all time);

DAIS also uses Google Analytics, which captures only visits to landing pages (item view). This feature is supported by DSpace configuration.