India's Data Contributions in Generalist Research Data Repositories: Challenges and Opportunities

The paper provides a brief overview of India's policy landscape regarding research data management and open data sharing. Most scientific research, advancements, and innovations happening across disciplines/fields in Indian academic and research organizations are being funded by the Government of India under its various ministries, departments, and autonomous agencies/bodies/councils/boards. However, though policies have existed, there is still a lack of proper organizational infrastructure aligned with those policies to support open data sharing. Further, the paper provides a quantitative analysis of India's contribution to Generalist Data Repositories in terms of data/datasets deposited/contributed by Indian academicians and researchers, under which key disciplines, and by which organizations. The study encompasses nine data repositories, namely Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, Open Science Framework (OSF), Vivli, and Zenodo, under the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), as well as Science Data Bank and IEEE DataPort. The number of datasets deposited from India by Indian contributors was extracted by searching and filtering through the search interfaces of those portals. Not all those repositories were found to offer proper search and retrieval options for extracting "country-wise" data directly with proper affiliations. Thus, the researchers employed other means, such as direct data request methods, to the repositories' administrators. Furthermore, through this study, the researchers argued that reasons like institutional and infrastructure challenges, the lack of widespread awareness and adoption of data management policies, limited funding support for data sharing initiatives, lack and gaps in technical know-how for data curation, understanding of proper metadata and data formats, and lack of mandatory data sharing requirements in research grants by funding agencies, are maybe some of the sole reasons. The study suggests that updated policies and procedures in institutions and funding agencies, the framing of national policies for supporting open data and sharing, and incentivizing data sharing, along with adequate awareness and capacity building of data management, are the needs and opportunities.