About

B2SHARE provides a repository for storing and publishing research data sets.

Modified: 21 February 2020

What is B2SHARE?

B2SHARE is the EUDAT user-friendly, reliable and trustworthy service for researchers, scientific communities and citizen scientists to store and publish research data from diverse contexts.

A winning solution to:

  • Store: facilitates research data storage
  • Preserve: guarantees long-term persistence of data
  • Publish: allows data, results or ideas to be published

B2SHARE features (see figure 1 below):

  • integrated with the EUDAT collaborative data infrastructure
  • free upload and registration of stable research data
  • data assigned a persistent identifier, which can be retraced to the data owner
  • data owner defines access policy
  • community-specific metadata extensions and user interfaces
  • openly accessible and harvestable metadata
  • application programming interface (REST API) for integration with community sites, application and workflows
  • data integrity ensured by checksum during data ingest
  • record metadata updates, versioning and management
  • file download statistics
  • professionally managed storage service – no need to worry about hardware provisioning
  • EUDAT user support
  • monitoring of availability and use
  • integrated license selector tool
  • based on established Invenio software

Figure 1: B2SHARE at a glance

Who benefits from B2SHARE?

B2SHARE is optimized for researchers who:

  • do not have adequate facilities for storing research data with metadata,
  • cannot guarantee long-term persistence of their locally-stored data, and
  • do not have adequate facilities to easily share data, results or ideas with colleagues worldwide.

The success of this service is based on mutual trust, in that the depositors must be able to rely on the professional management of their data by the service provider, and the service provider rely on the users depositing data with appropriate content.

Who can use it?

B2SHARE is open to all researchers and scientists who are affiliated to research institutions, universities as well as to individual researchers (citizen scientists). Researchers who want to deposit research data must register.

How can I use it?

The user documentation and the FAQ describe how to use the B2SHARE service. Educational material (such as screencasts) and a service helpdesk are avaliable. Community managers who want to get more details about this service, please contact EUDAT support.

EUDAT provides a training instance of the B2SHARE service that enables users to create test records and try out the REST API features without doing a formal publication.

What about Costs and Trust?

The B2SHARE service is free of charge for European scientists and researchers. The service is professionally managed and data is safely preserved via a backup service, and a disaster recovery plan is available.

The B2SHARE service will be advanced on top of the existing features:

  • the basic B2SHARE service will be provided by multiple service providers,
  • communities can request a premium service,
  • larger storage capacity for the premium service,
  • service provisioning based on SLAs,
  • users can select their service provider of choice and trust,
  • sharing data with user groups (extended restricted access),
  • social tagging.

Researchers can use the service free of charge for small number of uploads and records, but B2SHARE is subject to a "fair share" principle. If you are a researcher or community that needs to create many records or has many (large) files, please contact us through the service request portal.

B2SHARE in the EUDAT Service Suite

B2SHARE is integrated with EUDAT B2ACCESS, which enables user authorisation with various IDs amd fine-grained authorisation to services. B2SHARE metadata are published though the OAI-PMH standard interface, and are harvested and made available from the B2FIND service. Every artifact deposited in B2SHARE is automatically assigned a PID, which is managed through the EUDAT B2HANDLE service. Finally, digital objects that have been developed collaboratively on B2DROP can be deposited with ease on B2SHARE when they are mature enough for permanent storage. Provenance data and additional annotation can be provided using the B2NOTE service. These (but not all) relationships are depicted in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: B2SHARE in the EUDAT Services suite

Support

Please visit our training site on GitHub for B2SHARE and other hands-on training material.

Our B2SHARE presentations offer training material for the service.

Support for B2SHARE is available via the EUDAT ticketing system through the webform.

If you have comments on this page, please submit them though the EUDAT ticketing system.

Document Data

Version: 1.2.3

Authors:

Hans van Piggelen (SURF)

Editors:

Kostas Kavoussanakis (EPCC)