The Publication Workflow

Discuss Data enables researchers to store research data in a structured way and to publish the data in a citable form. To ensure the quality of the published data, all data published with Discuss Data undergo a three-step quality control process:

1. Submission
First, the creator (or depositor) of the Data Collection checks the completeness and usefulness of
a) the Data files,
b) the Metadata, and
c) the Documentation of Data Collection,
and, if necessary, obtains the consent of all other actors involved for publication.

“My data > Add new data” starts the publication process in a private preparation area. Other users (e. g. your team members) can be invited to the preparation process via the “Collaboration” feature. The publication wizard automatically guides through the publication process. In the "Versions & Publish"-section, the Data Submission Agreement will be generated. Afterwards, the Data Collection can be submitted for review to a Curator responsible for the corresponding category. After submission, the status of the Data Collection is set to “Pending”, and the Data Collection is automatically "frozen" for the period of the technical review by the Curator.

2. Technical Review
The responsible Curator checks the Data Collection for formal consistency and completeness and ensures the rules of Discuss Data laid down in the Discuss Data rules and policies are respected. If the Data Collection after this technical review is ready for publication, the Curator accepts and the Data Owner gets a notification that his/her Data Collection can be published.

If the Data Collection is not ready for publishing (due to whatever reason), the Curator declines and provides the Data Creator with instructions, how to improve the Data Collection. The Data Collection automatically is "unfrozen", so that it can be edited by the Data Owner, before it can be re-submitted for the technical review again. In case the problems have been solved, the Curator accepts the Data Collection for publication; otherwise, he declines and starts the editing process again, until the Data Collection is ready for publication.

3. Publication
If the Data Collection was accepted for publishing, the Data Creator gets a notification in his "Dashboard", that the Data Collection is ready for publishing. By clicking the green “Publish”-button, a wizard will appear and guide you trough the last steps of the publication process. Finally, the Data Collection will be made available on Discuss Data. It will also be assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for citation. If you have chosen to publish the dataset in "Open Access", it will also be mirrored to the DARIAH Repository.