Archiving Reproductive Health Wins Open Scholarship Prize

Archiving Reproductive Health is a digital preservation research project funded by the Wellcome Trust and hosted by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI). The project aims to provide long-term preservation and access to the many at-risk archives generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements.

The project recently won third place in the Open Scholarship Prize 2022. 

The Open Scholarship Prize, run as part of Open Scholarship Week, recognises the substantial contribution that Open Scholarship makes to the betterment of science and society. The aim is to award research and researchers that improve society and research generally through making research more accessible, transparent and reproducible.

The Prize is hosted by the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in partnership with the Open Scholarship Community Galway (OSCG) and NUI Galway.

The ARH submission gave an overview of the project to date and its first round of pilot collections, published in March 2022. Emphasis was placed on the use of subject terms and vocabularies to enable searchability and consistent cataloguing. Methods for preserving and making available social media content were presented, along with the project policy of using open licences where possible, allowing for widespread sharing and reuse. The project’s research protocols, also published under open licences, were highlighted. These factors enable the project outputs to fall under the requirements of FAIR data and Open Scholarship.