Mission Statement

The TextGrid Repository (TextGridRep) is a digital preservation archive for human sciences research data providing a variety of data for teaching and research purposes. It promotes open access to research data including open standards allowing an efficient reuse for research. The TextGridRep also provides researchers with a comprehensive and reliable service to store their data permanently, well described and with a stable reference for citation and reuse.

The TextGridRep is part of the TextGrid Virtual Research Environment (VRE), which offers besides digital preservation also open-source software for collaborative creation, analysis and publication of text and images. The TextGrid VRE is optimised for XML/TEI formats and editorial publication out of the TextGrid Laboratory (TextGridLab). An independent publication from the TextGridLab including other types of data and formats is equally possible by tools using the TextGridRep API such as TG-import.

The TextGrid Repository is a community orientated result of a national program to establish a Digital Humanities infrastructure in Germany DARIAH-DE and operates together with the DARIAH-DE Repository as part of the Humanities Data Center (HDC).

The mission of the TextGridRep is to serve national and international research, teaching and learning by providing long term preservation, further processing, openly sharing and dissemination of digital research data according to ethical and scientific standards of the international research community.

The repository's mission is in line with the Open Access strategy of the University of Göttingen and its research data policy. It provides all necessary resources to promote and support making the research results of its researchers as widely accessible and usable as possible. This commitment to open access is reflected in the organisational and technical infrastructure as well as in its archiving procedures of the repository to allow the use of publications and data without any access restriction in order “to support research and innovation in science […] and society in a direct and lasting way”.

In terms of data management, publication and preservation workflows are based on the Open Archiving Information System, see TextGrid Repository – Digital Object Management.

The commitment is strongly supported by the two relevant institutions ensuring also the long-term sustainability of the repository and its data: The Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) and the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen mbH (GWDG).

Both institutions share a commitment to the sustainability of services and to FAIR principles in research and its infrastructures. For the SUB research data management is an important aspect of the strategic aims of Göttingen State and University Library. Not only for research data, but for all digital resources, Göttingen State and University Library follows a policy, which contains guiding principles in order to ensure the quality for access, metadata and IT architecture.

In the context of open access, the Göttingen State and University Library also participates in national and international projects, such as the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and OpenAIRE. In this perspective the TextGrid Repository is also in line with open access requirements of important funders of the German research system as the German Research Foundation (DFG) (see https://www.dfg.de/formulare/2_00/v/dfg_2_00_de_v1215.pdf, p. 44, section 12.2.1) and the European Union. Mandates of the European Commission and the European Research Council require as stated e.g. in the European Open Access Pilot on Open Data all funded projects to publish their results in Open Access (see the Horizon 2020 Online Manual). The Research Department at Göttingen University offers detailed information about the European Union Open Access Pilot also on its web pages.