A big thank you to everyone who replied to my post on metadata versioning for data repositories.
A brief digest:
As expected, it looks like most institutional data repositories typically restrict editing privileges once a dataset has been approved so that changes to some or all metadata fields can only be made by request and/or require approval from admin staff. It is noteworthy that Neil and Laura, who both take the view that depositors should be permitted to update metadata records themselves, are using Figshare as their data repository. Figshare supports DOI versioning so that any changes to files and/or certain metadata fields will trigger a new version. It seems likely then, that where DOI/metadata versioning isn't an option, editing of published records is moderated. David's post raises another interesting question - is the decision to restrict editing rights for metadata solely determined by functional limitations or is it a policy decision also? i.e. if DOI versioning were to become available, how many repository managers would continue to restrict editing privileges?
As to why it is necessary to moderate changes to metadata, the most likely justification is to prevent changes to metadata fields that could alter the data citation e.g. the mandatory DataCite metadata properties (c.f. David's post), and it is changes to these properties that are most likely to trigger a new version. A related consideration is whether a new version should be created when only minor changes are made to metadata. Figshare triggers a new version if the title or author fields are modified but not for other metadata fields, while the Dataverse software forces 'minor' and 'major' versions, the former resulting from 'small' metadata changes, the latter from 'big' metadata changes e.g. author, title etc. (c.f. Sebastian's post).
Wayne
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