Nakala Huma-Num Research Data Repository

Overview

Nakala is a research data repository for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SSH), developed and hosted by Huma-Num, the French national research infrastructure for digital humanities. It provides researchers from the French academic community with a secure, interoperable platform for depositing, preserving, publishing, and sharing digital research data.

History and Founding

Nakala was developed by Huma-Num (formerly TGIR Huma-Num), a joint venture of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Campus Condorcet, and Aix-Marseille University. Huma-Num holds the IR* (Infrastructure de Recherche étoile) designation from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and is part of the national ESFRI roadmap. Nakala's data repository was formally designated a national data repository for SSH research data and is a recognised reference repository within the French Recherche Data Gouv ecosystem. The start of responsibility is recorded as 2014.

Collections and Holdings

Nakala accepts all types of digital research data from scientific projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including text, image, video, and sound files in any format. It accommodates data whether or not associated with a publication, and supports open, embargoed, and restricted access levels. Each deposited resource receives a persistent identifier (PID) that makes data and metadata citable. Metadata is described using the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative standard.

The repository hosts over 716,000 records. It is listed by the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and re3data.org, and participates in the OAI-PMH harvesting ecosystem. Nakala is also part of the broader ISIDORE discovery platform for SSH research data.

Access and Usage

Nakala is publicly accessible at nakala.fr. Deposit is open to researchers from the French academic world or participants in projects primarily supported by French academic institutions. Metadata for publicly deposited data is freely reusable under a CC-BY licence.