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Document in progress

NAKALA Deposit and Curation workflow

Image of NAKALA's Submission Workflow

Step-by-Step Process of how to submit your reserach data to the NAKALA repository

Preliminary step: Opening Your NAKALA Account

  1. Request a HumanID login
  2. Request access to NAKALA from your HumanID page.
  3. Discuss the scientific and technical project associated with the deposit with HumaNum’s team at Pôle Données.
  4. Pre-curation: At this stage, it is possible to request that Huma-Num or its partners give tailored recommendations to help deposit your data in NAKALA. This is a mandatory step if you wish to submit your data for level 2 or level 3 certification (see below).
  5. In all cases, we recommend that you use the NAKALA test instance to familiarize yourself with NAKALA functionalities before actually submitting your data.

Before submission: Data preparation

  1. Check that your data complies with the various regulations (GDPR, sensitive data etc.) and assign an approrpriate license to the data. If necessary, you will be asked to check with your establishment’s DPO that NAKALA is suitable for your type of data.

Below are some useful resources (in French) on this subject:

Deposit submission

  1. Consult information on the different submission methods offered by NAKALA.

  2. Deposit data and metadata via NAKALA

Publish the data set

At this stage, the dataset will be assigned a permanent DOI. If necessary, an embargo can be applied to the dataset.

Destroying a dataset

Depositors may not destroy their deposits unilaterally; a request must be made to HumaNum that explains the reasons. When a data set is destroyed, the metadata associated with the DOI is modified to indicate that the data is no longer present in NAKALA. This is known as the “tombstone” of the repository (eg. https://nakala.fr/10.34847/nkl.3bf54652).

Repository quality control in NAKALA

Quality control within NAKALA is carried out in two ways: either by automated checks integrated into NAKALA, or manually via exchanges with NAKALA and partner teams.

There are three levels of quality:

  • Level 1 Deposits at this level are checked by automatic controls at the time of deposit: certain metadata are mandatory for submission; others are checked for form and/or content (e.g. date form, license content, etc.).

  • Level 2 Submissions at this level are curated by Huma-Num or its partners to check their quality. The idea is to check that the data deposit is consistent with the scientific and technical project defined when access to NAKALA was granted. Among the characteristics to check are: richness and content of metadata, file formats, organization of the repository, etc. Nota Bene: The scientific quality of the dataset is not checked.

  • Level 3 Submissions at this level pass all the steps for level 2, and benefit from a further, extended check for deposit on the long-term preservation platform managed by CINES. The aim is to meet the requirements of CINES, which then takes responsibility for the long-term preservation and legibility of the data.

This advanced curation is carried out in collaboration with the Huma-Num and CINES teams: this process generally requires several stages of exchange with the depositor (e.g. modification of a file whose format has not been validated, adaptation of the repository organization for long-term preservation, etc.).

Following deposit at CINES, preservation information is integrated into NAKALA’s metadata (e.g. ARK identifier of CINES deposit).