December 13 is a momentous date in the history of the Stanford Digital Repository. It's the date in 2012 when the very first research data item was deposited in the SDR through our online deposit application. Which makes Dec. 13, 2014, the second anniversary of this historic occasion!
Who was our first depositor, how did he find us, and what did he deposit?
Hatef Monajemi, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, and several colleagues, including Professor David Donoho of the statistics department, were publishing a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They needed somewhere to put their related data so that it would be easily available to other researchers. The journal's recommendation was for authors to check digital repositories at their institutions. Hatef searched the internet and discovered that Stanford did indeed have a digital repository -- the SDR!
Meanwhile, back at Stanford Libraries, we were preparing to roll out the repository service for research data and wondering how to enlist our first depositors when we received a message from Hatef. He wanted to know if he could use the SDR for his data.
And the rest, they say, is history.
Hatef, Professor Donoho, and their colleagues made their first deposit two years ago and have returned several times since then to deposit data for other publications. And the word is getting out all over campus that the SDR is the place for publishing and preserving research data. The SDR is now being used by researchers from chemistry, earth sciences, statistics, engineering, marine biology, molecular and cellular physiology, psychology, history, music, and more to preserve and share their varied works.
"I think every scientist should consider using Stanford Digital Respository," said Hatef Monajemi. "It provides an easy-to-use platform for efficient communication of research findings which is essential to reproducibility and trust in science publications."
Thank you, Hatef. We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
Happy Anniversary, SDR!