The Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa makes the following tools and services available to the research community:
USER SUBSCRIPTION
The DIRISA User Subscription is used to allow users to authenticate themselves before using DIRISA services. Authentication is currently granted through SAFIRE. However, in the future, more federated identities will be managed.
MINT A DOI
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a globally unique and long term persistent identifier for a digital object. A DOI allows for greatly improved management of a digital object; it increases the discovery and hence, the value of a digital object. A minted (generated) DOI can be assigned to research datasets, collections, reports, conference papers and journals, amongst others.
The DOI minting service provided by DIRISA uses the DataCite DOI services and can be assigned to any object that is being deposited at the DIRISA storage infrastructure, through the DIRISA Data Deposit Tool. The service can also be used by researchers who wish to mint DOI’s for research objects stored outside of the DIRISA environment.
Research data is a critical part of the research process and while there are several cloud-based solutions to store data, DIRISA provides reliable, persistent and easily accessible resource to safely share data. The development of a cloud-based data deposit tool is underway and will be available to subscribed users.
DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER
Data sets at DIRISA and trusted repositories are persistently and uniquely identifiable through a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Apply for a DOI to be allocated to your data set through one of several such existing systems.
The South African Data Management Planning tool (SA_DMP) is a service developed by DIRISA to provide researchers with the ability to create data management plans that meet and conform to the requirements of universities and funders.
This tool contains a number of templates that are provided by various funders and universities. These templates contain questions that the researcher needs to answer to create and a data management plan. The tool provides a number of features to the researcher such as being able to save and share a copy of the plan, creating various versions and also downloading the plan in a number of different formats. All institutions are encouraged to contact DIRISA to ensure that their DMP and templates are included in the SA DMP Tool.
All research data management services provided by DIRISA are free of charge to the research community.