Resource Discovery

Resource Discovery Infographic

Value and Vision

The translational research community strives to preserve and disseminate a wide range of research works to enhance their visibility and opportunity for sharing and reuse, as well as receive contributor attribution and expertise acknowledgment. The Resource Discovery Core aims to provide a robust infrastructure to create tools and resources that empower the CTSA hubs, promote resource discovery and sharing capabilities, and enable attribution for contributions by the translational workforce.

Research Strategy

The Resource Discovery Core leverages effective strategies and inventive approaches to build connections within and beyond the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program. We have adapted and expanded our existing research profiling infrastructure using open collaborative approaches. The scope of this core is to develop tools for identification, tracking, and dissemination for a wide range of research objects (e.g., software, data, informatics, and other non-traditional scholarly products and activities) to enable proper attribution of credit on translational teams and discovery of these objects at both the local level and beyond. Extensive knowledge and expertise across the CTSAs is being applied to assist in the creation and success of community-wide collaborative functions. This mission is manifest in activities such as:

  • Provisioning a CTSA-wide index of all resources used across the full spectrum of CD2H activities
  • Creating expertise, visualizations, and services for adoption and assimilation by CTSA hubs for use in their local environments
  • Developing and deploying an open repository to support preservation, indexing, and discovery of resources at CTSA hubs
  • Developing a data discovery engine to index and search data across hubs (collaboration with Scripps Research Institute & Northwestern University)
  • Harmonizing educational resources from multiple existing platforms into a single shared discovery framework
  • Extending representation of expertise and related services across the CTSA consortium
  • Developing a practical, scalable model of contribution and fostering its adoption across the CTSA Program

Community Core Objectives

  1. Explore current resources sourced from the CTSA program and beyond
  2. Use attribution tools to help credit a wide range of activities in translation 
  3. Adopt open software to securely support sharing, preservation, credit, and discovery for data sets and a range of other scholarly products and activities
  4. Adopt data models to promote access, indexing, and discoverability of a wide range of resources, such as training, research, and engagement material

Presentations and Other Materials

Resource Discovery Core Community Meetings have been repurposed to meet the needs of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). See the N3C website for more information.

Active Projects

Information Architecture

An internal project aimed at developing single source of truth workflows for program management. This ongoing core infrastructure project creates an aggregated warehouse of resource information (expertise, services, documents, educational materials). 

Data Discovery Engine

The Data Discovery Engine provides a set of tools to help data providers and portal developers share dataset metadata in a more interoperable way, by combining metadata with an existing dataset plus structured metadata.

Archived Projects

InvenioRDM: A Next-Generation Repository for Research Data Management

Continuation of a Phase II project to complete the development of a born-interoperable repository and data catalog designed to empower researchers as they engage in good data practices around research data management, licensing, preservation, credit, discovery, and reuse of digital artifacts. 

Architecting Attribution

This project enables tracking and attribution of diverse contributions across the workforce to support credit for research contributors, provide a better understanding of what skills and activities are needed, and offer participation incentive.

Personas for Clinical and Translational Science

The CTS Persona Portfolio was developed to represent the diverse roles that make up its members, and reflects the spectrum and diversity of the roles that are required for successful translational research at the local hub level. The Personas project spaned the translational signposts of basic research, pre-clinical research, clinical research, clinical Implementation, and public health.

InvenioRDM: An Interdisciplinary Open Research Repository

InvenioRDM enables organizations to securely house research products and make them discoverable, shareable, reusable, and citable from publications and presentations to datasets, software, lay summaries, policy documents, and guidelines. 

Core Leads