We were joined in this session by Sonia Barbosa, Associate Director of Dataverse Support, who shared her expertise on streamlining data archiving workflows and giving academic credit to data curators. Sonia’s presentation highlighted practical steps toward making research data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (F.A.I.R.), while also advocating for better recognition of the often-overlooked role of data curation.
Watch the recording
The slides are available at https://africarxiv.ubuntunet.net/handle/1/1622
Session summary
Dataverse supports automating workflows for data archiving by offering APIs and integrations that reduce manual steps such as data deposit and metadata entry, thus improving efficiency. For African researchers and institutions with limited resources or staffing, this automation allows more time to be focused on research analysis rather than administrative tasks, making open data management easier and more scalable.
To incentivize quality data management, Dataverse includes detailed contributor roles for each dataset, explicitly recognizing roles like data curators. This metadata can be cited and linked to researcher identifiers like ORCID, enabling academic credit for curators. African researchers and institutions can adopt policies to list data curators as contributors alongside authors, helping to professionalize and reward this essential role.
Dataverse integrates FAIR principles by providing rich metadata, persistent identifiers, and standardized data formats for every dataset. These features enhance the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of research data, boosting the visibility and impact of African research within global knowledge networks.
Regarding data privacy and security, Dataverse allows institutions to host their own instances, maintaining full control over their data governance policies, permissions, and licenses. This flexibility is crucial for compliance with varied legal and ethical frameworks across African countries, fostering trust in digital infrastructure.
Collaboration is facilitated through Dataverse’s open-source, globally adopted platform. African universities and institutions can form regional networks or share repositories, enabling interdisciplinary and cross-border research partnerships. These collaborative efforts strengthen research capacity and resource sharing on the continent.
Overall, African researchers and institutions can benefit from Dataverse by automating workflows for efficiency, recognizing data curators, adopting FAIR standards, ensuring privacy aligned with local regulations, enhancing regional collaboration, and building sustainable data stewardship cultures for long-term research impact.
Speaker’s profile
Sonia Barbosa is the Associate Director of Dataverse Support, Data Curation, and the Murray Archive.
She is responsible for developing and promoting the use and benefits of the Dataverse Software and manages the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Sonia leads training sessions on data curation and works closely with users to help them organize, clean, and prepare their data for sharing and long-term preservation. She also offers curation support and guidance to software users across the board.
In addition to her work with Dataverse, she manages the data housed at the Murray Archive—a human subjects social science data archive that includes rich longitudinal data on women’s lives. She oversees the curation, preservation, processing, and dissemination of the archive’s collections.
Sonia completed her role as co-chair for Year Three of the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) in February 2025. This year, she continues to work on impactful projects that expand Dataverse and research support. Her current efforts include integrating large data services through Globus and implementing Traditional Knowledge Labels in the Harvard Repository in collaboration with Local Contexts.
Related resources
Dataverse website: https://dataverse.org
About the webinar series
This webinar was co-organized by UbuntuNet Alliance and Access 2 Perspectives as part of the ORCID Global Participation Program.
ORCID is the persistent identifier for researchers to share their accomplishments (research articles, data, etc with funding agencies, publishers, data repositories, and other research workflows.
AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. By enhancing the visibility of African research, we enable discoverability and collaboration opportunities for African scientists on the continent as well as globally.