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Today is the time of fourth-generation research paradigm based on data retrieval instrumentation. Accordingly, long-term storage and open access to research data so that academic community could reproduce them becomes the major challenge. Long-term data storage and access requires data collection, preservation, management, and warehousing facilities. In other words, data repositories are required. More and more universities and research centers are starting to build research data repositories allowing permanent access to data sets in a trustworthy environment. Newly developed research data management services register their repositories with re3data.org (Vierkant et al., 2014). re3data.org offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape (Pampel et al., 2013). re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines (Vierkant et al., 2014). The focus of re3data.org is on research data repositories and despite its size the re3data.org registry does not claim global coverage (Klump & Huber, 2017). At the time of this study (February 2018), it contains 2,029 registered data repositories. Among them there are such members as International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium cooperatively managed by 16 organizations from 12 countries. Another example is Datenbank Gesprochenes Deutsch, which is a nation-wide repository managed by a specific country (Germany in this case.) Also, services that allow publishers to access and publish data on a long-term basis are emerging around nongovernmental organizations, developing Data Citation Index and providing repository quality assessment. This shows that new core content of scientific information is quickly emerging. On the one hand, we observe a positive trend of moving towards a shared global environment for research data. On the other hand, we also see that international competition for priority is gaining momentum. This means, it is time to take active consideration on global data repository management and national participation strategy. Accordingly, a close analysis of different country profiles is needed, based on information available from re3data.org, which is a global registry of research data repositories. In this study we examine re3data.org repositories where three leading Asian economies (China, Japan, and Korea) are involved, and compare national profiles. In particular, this article will tell us which organizations contribute to the repository? And what kind of organizational types are? And who do the data versioning and product quality management? And who do the subject tagging service?

Open DOAR and ROAR are the most used repository registration services. In this study, however, we examine only the repositories registered with re3data.org. Accordingly, we do not consider previous research on OpenDOAR and ROAR. Recently, many studies on re3data.org have been made. Initially, they were mostly introductory in nature. Pampel et al. (2013) describes the heterogeneous RDR landscape and presents a typology of institutional, disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and project-specific RDR, outline the features of re3data.org, and shows how this registry helps to identify appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data. Hayslett (2015), based on data librarian experience, points out the importance of data standardization at all levels, and introduces re3data.org as an example. Elger, Pampel, Vierkant, and Witt (2016) describe how new re3data.org features, such as user-friendly icon system and Application Programming Interface (API), help collect re3data metadata. According to Pampel et al. (2016), publishers like Copernicus Publications, PeerJ, and Nature’s Scientific Data make it their editorial policy to recommend researchers re3data.org as a relevant platform for data store. Klump and Huber (2017) examined the impact of persistent identifier system, including how it facilitates repositories registered withre3data.org. ShaSha, ZHANG. GuoBin, HUANG. Qian and GENG (2017) analyzed four major features (responsibility subjects, platform functions, data resources, and data transmissions) across 247 data publishing platforms, including re3data. Kim and Choi (2017) conducted an examination of metadata registered with re3data.org and carried out product quality assessment. Generally, re3data. org has been studied intensively for many important aspects from simple introduction of the service through features and properties of the registered data to the quality of provided metadata and in-depth analysis of the registered repositories themselves. However, there has been no investigation using re3data.org metadata to deduce how different countries participate in data repositories. Accordingly, this study retrieves and analyzes information for involved organizations related to major Asian economies (Korea, China, and Japan).

The collected data are stored in a relational database and evaluated against the proposed re3data.org schema. For this purpose, we use data collection crawler developed by Kim and Choi (2017) with some modification of access point and data retrieval protocol. The collected data are converted to the form suitable for further analysis and stored in the database. At the time of this study (February 2018) we collected information for 2,029 data repository entries, 12,126 subject entries, 3,185 policy entries, 2,028 licensing entries, 2,025 data access entries, 2,011 data upload entries, 6,275 institution entries (4,185 with full mapping), 15,038 keyword entries, 606 metadata standardization entries, 2,014 identifier entries, 2,021 repository responsibility entries, and 2,427 repository type entries.

There are, however, some questions with regard to collected data content and quality. First, the lack of identifier. re3data.org does not provide institution identifiers, so we need to use mapping. re3data supports the following entries for institutions: the name (institutionName), country (institutionCountry), responsibility type (responsibilityType), institution type (institutionType), web address (institutionURL), responsibility start date (responsibilityStartDate), responsibility end date (responsibilityEndDate), contact (institutionContact). The problem, however, is that no identifier is provided. In the end, we do not examine institution type and responsibility type. For the purpose of our analysis, we group institutions by name. Later on, more detailed analysis will be required, which would consider full and abbreviated name of the institution to construct the Authority file. Second, some country codes contain inaccurate values. For example, there are 224 instances of "AAA" country code for institutions registered with the repository. In this study, we use country codes as is, without adjustment. Figure 1 shows how the crawler retrieves the data from re3data.org and the database schema for storing the collected data.

Fig. 1. 
re3data.org crawling process and database schema

In this study we analyze repository info, institution info, versioning and product management info, as well as subject tags collected from re3data.org.

In this study we collected and analyzed data from e3data.org, which is a global registry of data repository services. We analyzed data profile for three leading Asian economies–Korea, China, and Japan–against the reference data for the countries, which participate in repository management. In particular, we examined how individual countries contribute to the repository, organizational type, versioning and product quality management, and subject tagging.

We come to the conclusion that all three Asian countries still fall short in terms of involvement. They participate in 95 international repositories; of which 46 repositories involve more than two countries among them. At the same time, there are 2,613 institutions from the USA, 766 from Germany, and 561 from England. Korea is represented by 7 institutions, China 64, and Japan 120. Among Chinese organizations, 3 are profit, 61 non-profit, and 37 organizations (which yields 1.8%) are involved in repository building. In Japan, there is 1 is commercial and 119 non-profit organizations, of which 57 (3.0%) are involved in repository building. All 7 organizations from Korea are non-profit, and 6 of them (0.3%) are involved in repository building. As for versioning management, 47.6% (965 repositories) provide corresponding information. Accordingly, 52.4% (1,064 repositories) do not provide versioning services. Among the examined repositories, 83.4% (805 repositories) support versioning, while 16.6% (160 repositories) do not. Among 2,029 registered data repositories 99.0% (2,009 repositories) provide quality management info. As regards versioning and product quality management, China, Japan, and Korea are up to par with other countries. Subject analysis reveals that Korea contributes more to geosciences, Japan to physics and geosciences, while China, unlike Korea and Japan, is more active in life sciences.

In this study we only mention some problems related to the quality of the collected data, and perform simple statistical analysis. Speaking of source data quality, we expect that re3data.org can work on this. There are many fields such as ‘PIDsystem’, ‘policy’ and software etc. which contains the information not analyzed in this article. In the future study, these fields are going to be analyzed. For one thing, it is important for the future studies not simply apply basic statistics, but being able to carry out full-fledged comparative analysis of R&D activities by country.

At the moment, we believe that analyzing repositories based on re3data.org source data is a challenging task. In any case, it is hoped that this study will help planning domestic infrastructure for research data repositories with proper consideration for specific research domains and national characteristics. We believe this study can serve as a starting point for future works that will perform comprehensive analysis for different countries.