Element 3: Standards

Relevant information

In the Harvard Dataverse Repository, a dataset contains three levels of metadata:

Citation Metadata: any metadata that would be needed for generating a data citation and other general metadata that could be applied to any dataset;
Domain Specific Metadata: with specific support currently for Social Science, Life Science, Geospatial, and Astronomy datasets; and
File-level Metadata: varies depending on the type of data file (for more details see File Handling section below) and include options like file tags, descriptions, and hierarchy preservation.

Harvard Dataverse has no requirements for data formatting. However, we recommend that researchers consult the NIH Common Data Elements in their collection protocols to support data comparison and aggregation and use file formats that are common for the data type and disciplinary community. For more details about what Citation and Domain Specific Metadata is supported please see our Appendix.

About Element 3: Standards

Element 3: Standards	State what common data standards will be applied to the scientific data and associated metadata to enable interoperability of datasets and resources.
Harvard Dataverse Recommends	Description	Links to Best Practices Guide
Apply relevant metadata	Choose metadata fields from Harvard Dataverse Citation Metadata (Required) Geospatial Metadata Social Science and Humanities Metadata Astronomy and Astrophysics Metadata Computational Workflow Metadata	Supported Metadata Blocks
Apply additional NIH project metadata	Life Sciences Metadata CodeMeta (forthcoming)	Life Sciences metadata block based on based on ISA-Tab Specification, along with controlled vocabulary from subsets of the OBI Ontology and the NCBI Taxonomy for Organisms: CodeMeta metadata block based on CodeMeta schema.
Establish bidirectional link between dataset and related publications	Cite related publication/s using related publication field Cite dataset DOI in your publications and reference lists	Data citation best practices: https://dataverse.org/best-practices/data-citation
Sample DMP Text for Section 3.1	Harvard Dataverse is committed to using standard-compliant metadata to ensure that metadata can be mapped easily to standard metadata schemas and be exported into JSON format (XML for tabular file metadata) for preservation and interoperability. The Life Sciences metadata block will be applied to all datasets resulting from this research. Metadata, configurations, and parameters related specifically to software applications that cannot be described in Dataverse will be recorded in documentation files and will be published along with data.