e!Dal - a Open Source Software to Store, Share and Publish Research Data

e!DAL (https://edal.ipk-gatersleben.de/) is an open source software to publish and share research data in compliance to journal, funding agencies and open data policies (Arend et al. 2014 BMC Bioinformatics). Designed as broker between in-house file storage and data registries, it is provided as an all-in-one but small JAVA package that can be operated as micro service at any network accessible server. Prerequisites are a mounted, sufficient sized file system, access to an e-mail server, and open http(s) ports. Recommendable is a registration as DataCite data centre to enable e!DALs support for an automatic registration of published data sets as journal and founding agency proven citable digital object identifiers (DOI). Already embedded features are:

• http(s) server to support web and DOI access to data sets,
• database to store and associate DataCite and Dublin core (ISO 15836) compliant meta data,
• data submission tool,
• e-mail based reviewing and approval system,
• access logging and statistics for data publication metrics,
• API to embed into custom JAVA clients,
• WebDAV support to mount e!DAL as NAS file system,
• OAI-PMH meta data harvesting protocol
• version control system
• text search engine

e!DAL is already the basis for the PGP research data repository (Arend et al. 2016 Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation) where 113 DOIs and more than 150.000 files are published. e!DAL driven PGP repository is accepted as data repository for Nature Publishig Group, is registered in re3data.org, OpenAIRE and DataCite. This shows e!DAL capabilities to build individually configured research data from the scratch or use e!DAL as API in custom bioinformatics tools or databases.

In the software demo session we will show step-by-step how to set-up an e!DAL instance, demonstrate the data submission process and give some best practice how to operate an in-house e!DAL based research data repository.