Submission Process

This page describes the process of creating, submitting and publishing data on Edmond. Also aspects of curation are addressed here.

Quick summary

Steps in order to publish data on Edmond

• Check whether your data is in scope of Edmond and check for legal aspect - cf pages Legal Notes and Conditions_Prerequisites
• Log in to Edmond
• Create dataset draft
• Click on "Submit", which will start the review process.
• Once everything is fine: Send a confirmation that you want to publish.

Introduction

This sections contains background information and explains terms regarding the curation levels and curation roles involved in the curation process.

Background: Motivation for the improved curation process

About a decade ago, when Edmond had been launched, the main focus was to provide an easy-to-use discipline-agnostic repository, where Max Planck scientists can publish their research data. While meanwhile general-purpose repositories like zenodo exist, offering non-curated file deposit, Edmond aims to provide research data of high quality and reusability. The data shall be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), which requires appropriate metadata to find and unterstand the data, as well as interoperable file formats.

In order to improve the FAIRness of our data, we included enhanced review processes to our existing curation process. Thus, on 2026-07-20, a review process has been added between the data submission1 and the final data publication. We are aware, that this review process, which involves personal interaction between the data provider (author) and the Edmond team, has the downside of making the data publication process slower. However, considering the strongly increasing data volumes and the large differences in the metadata quality of the submitted data, we see the necessarity to be able to intervene and propose improvements before the publication and archiving of data for at least 10 years or longer. And we expect that the increase of the reusability of our datasets will justify the enhanced effort caused by the review process.

Terms used on this page, curation roles

• BasicReview, EnhancedReview, PreliminaryReview
  Curation level for a dataset, cf below and here.
• DataSubmitter
  Submitter of the dataset, i.e. the person which creates the dataset and communicates with DataReviewer.
• DataReviewer
  A person of the Edmond team who reviews the dataset, communicates with DataSubmitter, and does the final steps of the publishing process.
• DataCarer
  Edmond data steward. This is a person or position, which takes care about the curation of the dataset, in particular after the dataset has been published. DataCarer also serves as an additional contact person for the case that DataSubmitter should not be available any more in case of future user questions. A DataCarer is a member of the Edmond team or works at a Max Planck Institute. See also here for details.

Curation levels BasicReview, EnhancedReview and PreliminaryReview

See here for the description of the curation levels.

Per default, data sets in Edmond are published as level BasicReview, which means that a basic data curation takes place by the Edmond team before the data are published.

Furthermore we offer level EnhancedReview for selected datasets. This includes stricter requirements considering the file format, namely the suitability of the file format for long-term archiving. See page Data Guide for recommended formats. The dataset must contain an explicit description of each file of the dataset, giving information about the file format and content. For tabular data, each column has to be described. Usually, this information is expected to be given in one or several separate Readme files. Giving these information as part of the dataset description or in the header of the data file may also be accepted. Additionally to DataSubmitter, a DataCarer must be defined, who takes care about the dataset and who can act as contact for the case that DataSubmitter would not be reachable any more. See here for details.

There may be situations where a dataset needs to be published even before all medadata have their final stage. An example is publishing a dataset related to a text publication: For the last steps in publishing a paper, the supporting data may be requested to be already published on Edmond, while the DOI of the paper is not known yet. In that case, we can publish the first dataset version 1.0 even without providing the final reference to the paper, choosing PreliminaryReview as curation level. Then, once the paper is published and its DOI is known, an updated dataset version 1.1 is created with curation level "BasicReview" or "EnhancedReview", where the paper is referenced properly.

Curation workflow

The following figure depicts the typical workflow during the process of submission, review and publication of a dataset.

Description of the steps:

• DataSubmitter creates a first draft of the dataset in Edmond, fills the metadata fields and uploads the data files.
• Once done, DataSubmitter clicks button "Submit".
• This starts the review process.
  • DataReviewer reviews the dataset. Depending on the complexity of the dataset and our workload, this may take a couple of days.
  • Where necessary, DataReviewer makes suggestions to DataSubmitter for improving the dataset.
  • Depending on the complexity of the dataset, the exchange between DataReviewer and DataSubmitter may have several rounds.
• Once everything is fine, DataReviewer asks DataSubmitter for the confirmation to publish the dataset.
• After confirmation by DataSubmitter, the dataset gets published by DataReviewer. This includes the registration of the DOI, and the dataset will be openly accessible.

To consider:

• The exchange between DataSubmitter and DataReviewer is done via email based on a ticket system. Therefore, the subject line of the email has to be retained when replying, at least the square bracket with its content.
• Before you upload data, please take care that you are allowed to do that - cf pages Legal Notes and Conditions & Prerequisites. This includes to check:
  • Are you the owner of the data, or does the owner agree with your publication?
  • The dataset must not contain any sensitive data
  • The data have to be within the scope of Edmond.
  • Once published, data will be accessible without access restrictions and must not be modified any more.

Notes:

• Because the review process can take some time, we recommend to submit the the dataset draft early enough before it needs to be published.
• If you have any questions related to the submission process, the data structure, file formats or metadata, do not hesitate to contact the Edmond support team. You can even do that before having created the first dataset draft. It is also possible to have a video meeting for discussing your (planned) data publication. We recommend this in particular in case you are planning to publish larger datasets, datasets with multiple files or several similar-shaped datasets.

Further details:

• Per default, the dataset draft can not be modified by the DataSubmitter after having clicked "Submit".
  • Therefore, desired changes in the dataset metadata are communicated by email to the DataReviewer, who edits the dataset draft accordingly.
  • In case there is the need to add or replace files, the DataReviewer may provide an upload link for the new files.
  • In the case that larger modifications should be needed (e.g. upload of several larger files), DataReviewer may reopen the dataset for editing, so that DataSubmitter can do the modifications and then click again the "Submit" button.
• For the case that a long-term archiving of a dataset is desired, see our long-term archiving guidelines here.