ds004 - Impact Repository

Overview

An Impact Repository is a digital repository designed to serve as a home for research content that falls outside the scope of traditional academic journals. A substantial portion of influential research material is often overlooked by conventional journals. These materials are often not simply “papers” but include datasets, codebases, proposals, operation manuals, videos, audio interviews, and more. These materials are invaluable. Organizations engaged in extensive research generate significant content that lacks an appropriate outlet. An impact repository serves as an open and accessible platform that accommodates a wide range of unconventionally formatted documents. By offering a flexible and community-driven repository for all research outputs, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their impact. This includes both successful and unsuccessful outcomes, providing a clearer picture of research trajectories and overall influence.

Key Ideas

• Keep submission as simple and easy as possible. Capture first, refine and structure as needed.
• Community curation and review, along with contextual connections are important signals. It needs to be easy to contribute these.
• Exploring large repositories can be overwhelming. We have the opportunity to build many interfaces and tools for exploration, independently of submission and curation processes.

Important Details

• An impact repository necessarily has to support many different formats, lest it misses a huge chunk of the produced impact.
• Providing forms for public comment or contribution, such as structured reviews or open comments, in turn produces a type of pub that becomes part of the impact graph.