Collaboration, reproducibility, and replicability are the keys to researchers’ success. The Indiana University Libraries recognized these needs and along with the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI), partnered with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) to create CADRE (Collaborative Archive & Data Research Environment) to meet these needs. CADRE enables researchers from across the globe to access big datasets, reproduce shared research results, and replicate shared queries in addition to many other features. CADRE is currently seeded with the Web of Science (WoS), Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent datasets. CADRE is also supported by a group of more than 20 cross-industry partners.
Jaci Wilkinson
By encouraging these types of collaborative relationships, we’re not duplicating work and we’re creating a more open environment and encouraging more data to be open so that more researchers can work on it, collaborate, and share work which in turn should increase reproducibility.
Jaci Wilkinson, Executive Director of CADRE
CADRE is a first-of-its-kind service in the academic research community. It enables researchers to do science of science research with the WoS, MAG, and USPTO datasets. In the future, CADRE’s leadership hopes to expand CADRE’s reach and support other types of research as well. It also provides a place for researchers to save and share their results with other researchers through “Marketplace”. Marketplace provides access not only to the data but also to the tools that are used on the data and any visualizations that are included. CADRE organizes this data into a publishable package that is archived and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This helps with the provenance, replicability, and reproducibility of the data because it can be traced back to CADRE, and everything included in the package is guaranteed to work on CADRE. This functionality allows others to replicate the research and use the data from the original shared object with other tools or to use the same tools from the original shared object with other data. This provides a solution to an ongoing problem in the scientific community, the lack of built-in reproducibility and replicability with statistical analysis and studies where analysis is done. It’s very difficult to replicate and mirror results if you want to validate what a study claims to have found, so a framework like CADRE really sets up a model for solving some of these bigger problems. Jaci Wilkinson, Executive Director of CADRE says, “By encouraging these types of collaborative relationships, we’re not duplicating work and we’re creating a more open environment and encouraging more data to be open so that more researchers can work on it, collaborate, and share work which in turn should increase reproducibility.”
Collaborative Archive and Data Research Environment (CADRE)
Designing and building a user-friendly, fast system was a challenge for IUNI and Research Technologies (RT). Initial queries would run for weeks. IUNI and RT worked together to shorten the query times to just a few minutes. They have also built a federated system that tracks logins based on the institution where a researcher resides. CADRE relies on the data provided by the researcher’s university to track the licensing schema for the university and give researchers access to the resources they’ve licensed. CADRE has two components, one is an on-premises system, which works on Carbonate (and Indiana University supercomputer) nodes, but the majority of CADRE is in a cloud-based gateway. In the beginning, IUNI used Jetstream to design and build CADRE, but they eventually moved it to AWS and Azure for scalability purposes.
Valentin Pentchev
They [Carbonate and Jetstream] are local and they come with an amazing support team. With commercial vendor systems, the support is there but it’s not as easily accessible as it is here at IU.
Valentin Pentchev, CADRE Project Co-Director, Director of Information Technology at IUNI
IUNI and RT continue to use Jetstream as a resource to design tools and parts of CADRE which are then pushed to the commercial cloud. According to Val Pentchev from IUNI, the main advantages they have encountered in using Jetstream and Carbonate are that “they are local and they come with an amazing support team. Joe Rinkovsky assists us with Carbonate and we are extremely grateful for everything he does and for the very quick turnaround. With commercial vendor systems, the support is there but it’s not as easily accessible as it is here at IU.”
The work that the Indiana University Libraries and IUNI are doing with CADRE is exciting and groundbreaking.
