Welcome to Boloka, the open access Institutional Repository of the North-West University (NWU-IR). This is a digital archive that collects, preserves and distributes research material created by members of the NWU.

The aim of the NWU-IR is to increase the visibility, availability and impact of the research output of the North-West University through Open Access, search engine indexing and harvesting by several initiatives.

The North-West University has its own Institutional Data Repository called DaYta Ya Rona, powered by Figshare. This data repository facilitates data publishing, sharing and collaboration of academic research, allowing NWU to manage and in some cases showcase its data to the wider research community

Research data repositories

Digital Research data is best preserved and published using a research data repository. A repository enables the publication, preservation, and curation of data underpinning published research. It is an online database archive that manages the long-term storage and preservation and of digital resources and provides a platform for the data to be accessible, discoverable and citeable. Research funding agencies now increasingly mandate that the data generated during research projects they pay for to be preserved and made available to others for periods of 10 years or more beyond the point of research publication. Some publishers provides data centres for that purpose. Some journal publishers specify repositories in which data may be deposited.

Benefits:

• Enables publication of research data, with a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for citation.
• Enables the preservation and curation of research data beyond the lifetime of a project.
• Anyone can search the Repository for data.
• The data content is indexed by major search engines and enables anyone to search for the data.
• Enables compliance with Research Councils and other major funding bodies’ policies.
•  Improve the reproducibility of your research findings
• Receive credit via the citation of your data in future research
• Ensure that your data can be re-used, re-analysed, or combined with other datasets in future, to contribute to the advancement of your field
• Ensure you can locate and access the data yourself in the future, without having to actively manage it and maintain it.

• Search for datasets and other data repositories on re3data.org, a registry of Research Data Repositories
• Search for datasets from other South African Universities at https://southafrica.figshare.com/