About the data population

There are 5 main content types on the SSH Open Marketplace, which are considered to be representative for the large array of digital resources that can be found on this discovery platform.

In order to have high quality and high relevance content in the SSH Open Marketplace, we have established inclusion criteria for entry into the discovery platform. These apply both to individual items added manually by users, as well as to mass ingestions of entire sources (more on that below). 

Here is a list of four questions to ask before adding a resource on the SSH Open Marketplace and the ensuing inclusion criteria: 

1. The relevance of the resource. The question to ask is : will this resource be relevant to the SSH scientific community? Thus, to be selected, any resource must fulfil at least two criteria: (1) scientific relevance and usefulness for SSH research and researchers and (2) pertinence to the digital methodologies used within the SSH landscape.
2. The technical status of the resource. The question to ask is: is the resource current, supported, and ideally open? The SSH Open Marketplace favours the uptake of Open Science workflows and open research practices. Software resources are preferably built upon open source solutions.
   Note: Given that the SSH Open Marketplace seeks to mirror actual research practices, commercial or non-current resources are also referenced where these are relevant for the scientific community.
3. The degree of compliance with Open Science requirements of the resource. The question to ask is: is the resource FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable - or contributing to the uptake of Open Science best practices? The SSH Open Marketplace maximises the findability and re-use of data, and guides users towards tools, services or training materials that can help them in their FAIRification of workflows.
4. The uniqueness of the resource The question to ask is: is the resource already in the Marketplace? If yes, there is no need to add it again, either as an individual item or with a source. Even though duplicate entries are dealt with within the Marketplace, ingesting identical (or worse almost identical) entries multiple times uses up valuable human resources that will be better put to use elsewhere considering the limited timeframe and personnel of the project

1. Contextualization is one of the key pillars of the SSH Open Marketplace. It is meant to provide a discovery portal for tools and services, while placing these tools and services in context via publications, training materials, datasets, and workflows. As such, these last four categories are indexed in the SSH Open Marketplace insofar as they can be placed in relation with tools and services, and if no relation to a tool or service exists, they should not be accepted. 
2. Curation is, alongside contextualization, a key pillar of the SSH Open Marketplace. We believe that accurate and up-to-date content is key to making the SSH Open Marketplace a rich and useful discovery portal. As such, data population and curation are at the heart of our work. Once (meta)data have been ingested in the Marketplace, we curate and enrich them thanks to a hybrid approach: automated checks are run on the ingested data, followed by manual review of the identified problems as well as of aspects that cannot be checked automatically. In this process, contributors and moderators are playing an essential role (See “How to contribute”). 
3. Quality of the (meta)data: higher quality data will increase the quality of the Marketplace. This means that the more of the metadata fields in the Marketplace data model are covered by an item, the better (items with just a title and a link are inferior to ones containing a long description and maybe even a list of contributors) and the more good quality metadata in your item or source, the higher the overall quality of the item or source. Note: currently, most publications lack metadata. This is a temporary situation, which is due to the fact that they were automatically ingested with the purpose to automatically identify relations with the other types of resources included in the SSH Open Marketplace. 
4. Focus on primary sources: in the Marketplace, we give priority to primary sources and exclude sources that only aggregate information that can be found elsewhere. Such “2nd hand metadata” introduces additional points of failure and using the primary source instead will likely result in higher quality metadata.
5. The technical interface: it is easier to import a source into the Marketplace if it offers a well-documented API. Considering the limited human resources of the team, sources which needed a lot of additional work before they could be fed into the ingestion pipeline are placed very low on the priority list. 

For more questions, please [contact us](/contact).

During the development phase of the SSH Open Marketplace, we identified and prioritised trusted sources (i.e compliant with the Core Principles defined above) from which to gather information to populate the SSH Open Marketplace. Over the 3 years of the SSHOC project, 15 sources have been ingested for a total of over 5,000 individual items. The sources are listed below.

If you don’t see some of these sources in the Marketplace, it is because they are still in the process of being ingested. New sources are also regularly added (between 1 to 2 sources per year). As there are some criteria to comply with, please check the Contribute section if you would like to suggest new sources.