As a part of my work related  to the seminar of Open Data, I’ll  try to resume my first impact with the presented instruments, which are supposed to help researchers to share their data ( and so, optimize their work ) and enhance their visibility with an easier publication of their results to get the best impact.

The instruments that I tried to exploit for this work are ORCID (as basic author identifier), Zenodo (as open access archive), GitHub (as hosting service for research software) and Figshare (as an online digital repository for research data and results).

As a new Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering, who as not achieved many results up to now, and who’s currently involved in the programming of a code, I decided to focus mainly on the features offered by GitHub which will allow to share my code with my supervisor and colleagues.

I have been looking before for a tool like GitHub, which has the potential to optimize the sharing and review process of a code. Part of the code I am writing was uploaded on the platform and, following the tutorial, a branch was created in order to submit a modification to review. As for now I’m the only user who’s collaborating with the review of the code but, given the utility of the tool I’m looking forward to share it with all others individuals involved in the development of the code.

As part of the work, I exploited the Github-Zenodo integration feature. After setting up Zenodo’s synchronization with Github and ORCID, I released the repository, which was previously edited and published on Github, and took the Digital Object Identifier badge.

Once my ORCID profile had been initialized and my personal details updated (education, and employment), the DOI of my repository was been included in my profile as one of my works.

A similar work (less in details) has been performed using the Figshare platform.

I consider the instruments presented along the seminar an extremely powerful way to collect, share, exploit and advertise the work of a researcher in a way which is mostly new and free from older constraints. The value of the research itself is so, enhanced and collaborations are made way easier in benefits of the results.

Since my work consisted in only testing such tools, many of their features are still not clear or just unknown, but the confidence will increase with their usage.

What can be, in my opinion, improved is the way these tools interface themselves so that the process can be made easier, even if the provided online tutorials are clear enough.