Helping Scholars Work with Research Data

CORPUS (Chicago Online Research and Publication Service) has been established at the University of Chicago as an affordable, non-profit service for scholars and librarians. It provides an efficient and economical way to work with digital data of all kinds through all stages of research, including managing a project’s data, publishing the data on the Web, and preserving it for the long term in the University of Chicago Library.

For more information or to arrange a consultation, please send email to corpus@uchicago.edu. 

A New Era of Academic Publishing

CORPUS enables scholars to publish their data on the Web for others to use. This can be done either informally, via a self-published website, or more formally under the imprint of the University of Chicago as a durable, citable, peer-reviewed, and professionally edited online publication with an ISBN number.

These formal CORPUS publications are intended to meet the standards required for academic promotion. They are overseen by an editorial board consisting of leading scholars in a range of fields. The University of Chicago Press is represented on the board and provides guidance concerning best practices for academic publishing and peer review.

A Non-Profit Service Open to All

CORPUS is a non-profit service. It does not charge an annually recurring subscription fee. Instead, there is typically a one-time fee payment whose amount depends on the number of project collaborators or authors and the size and complexity of the data. This fee may be waived in some cases. The data is preserved indefinitely without requiring any additional payment.

The CORPUS staff currently support the research of several hundred scholars and scientists across the disciplines of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. New projects and publications are welcome. For more information or to arrange a consultation, send email to corpus@uchicago.edu.

Preserving Data for the Long Term

The University of Chicago Library preserves the data of all CORPUS-supported projects, publications, and collections. The data is stored in the Library Digital Repository, a state-of-the-art facility with a high storage capacity that adheres to best practices for mitigating the risk of data loss.

It is part of the Library’s mission to ensure that digital research data will remain available for future use in the long term, subject to accessibility restrictions in some cases for legal or scholarly reasons.

Projects, Publications, and Collections

CORPUS assists scholars and librarians at the University of Chicago and elsewhere in a wide range of digital efforts. These are categorized as (1) active projects, (2) peer-reviewed publications, or (3) library collections. CORPUS supports them as separate activities and also makes it easy to move from one to another, since a project will often lead to a digital publication and/or produce data files that are catalogued in a digital collection. 

Projects

CORPUS facilitates data management, analysis, and visualization for projects involving research or pedagogy. As the data is being compiled it is kept private for internal use by the project directors and their collaborators. They are under no obligation to make their data public, but if they wish to do so they can easily create a self-published website that is automatically generated from the database or they can submit a proposal to CORPUS to produce a peer-reviewed online publication under the imprint of the University of Chicago.

Publications

CORPUS produces durable and citable online publications via a process that involves the submission of a publication proposal, peer review of both the proposal and the final product, and professional editing of the published content, just as one would do for a printed book. Authors may engage with CORPUS by submitting a publication proposal at the outset, if they know what they want to publish and have already compiled the data. Alternatively, a potential author may first set up a project to compile data in the database and develop ideas about what to publish, and then submit a publication proposal.

Collections  

CORPUS helps librarians catalogue and manage digital collections comprised of data from completed digital projects or from the digitization of collections of non-digital materials (paper documents and photographs, films, analog sound recordings, etc.). The digital collections held in the University of Chicago Library are being catalogued and managed via the OCHRE platform as part of the Library’s UChicagoNode project.

Acknowledgments

CORPUS was established with the generous financial support of Mr. Paul Funk of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a cooperative endeavor of the Division of the Arts & Humanities, the Library, and the Press of the University of Chicago.