The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) is thrilled to announce the beta launch of Lunaris, a scalable, national research data discovery service provided by the Alliance as one of its core Research Data Management services.
Formerly known as the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) Discovery Service, Lunaris is a standalone platform to complement the repository services of FRDR. The bilingual Lunaris platform provides a single point of search for Canada’s multidisciplinary research data held in a variety of repositories including those of post-secondary institutions, departments at all levels of government, research organizations and national repository initiatives. There are over 80,000 datasets from over 100 Canadian repositories and data collections currently indexed for discovery. Lunaris features integrated text- and map-based search functionality, improved user experience design and new branding.
Lunaris supports FAIR principles and benefits many different members of the research community:
- Researchers: ability to discover and reuse data for research purposes
- Institutions: increased discoverability of their repository data at a national and international level
- Repository managers: access to a list of Canadian repositories, and increased discovery for repositories via interoperable and centralized infrastructure
- RDM support specialists: ability to reference Lunaris as a way to get buy-in from researchers and institutions
- Funders: meet policy objectives related to reuse
- Society: increased findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of research data with the intention of informing policy, education and further research
Lunaris contains features that benefit the broader research community in several ways:
- A specialized tool and service: a tool created for national discovery along with devoted service provision
- Text-based search capabilities: keyword text searching functionality
- Map search capabilities: an innovative approach for searching that is helpful if geographic location is a significant aspect of the research
- Mutually beneficial processes: a workflow that breaks down repository silos and drives traffic back to original source repositories
- Interoperable in a broader ecosystem: an openly available OAI-PMH feed that facilitates sharing of Lunaris metadata with international discovery platforms such as OpenAIRE Research Graph, Data Citation Index and Proquest Central Discovery Index, extending the reach and impact of Canadian research to a global stage
Provide feedback
The project team is seeking feedback on the beta version of Lunaris. Please send feedback to support@lunaris.ca. Feedback will be used to identify improvements for the full production launch.
With the launch of Lunaris, FRDR continues to operate as a robust repository option for Canadian researchers to deposit and preserve their research data. Data that is deposited into FRDR is discoverable in FRDR and Lunaris, and is curated by the Alliance’s data curation team, helping researchers to comply with the FAIR principles. Please fill out this survey about the FRDR user experience.
Join us for a webinar
Join members of the Alliance’s RDM team for a webinar to learn more about Lunaris and FRDR:
Innovative Solutions for Data Management Challenges: An Introduction to FRDR and Lunaris
Friday, April 14, 1pm – 2pm ET
Zoom - Registration
For more information about Lunaris or FRDR, please contact RDM-GDR@alliancecan.ca.