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, librarians, and academic publishers. It provides an efficient and economical way to work with digital data of all kinds through all stages of research. CORPUS helps people manage and analyze their data, publish it on the Web, and preserve it in the University of Chicago Library.
For more information or to arrange a consultation, please send email to corpus@uchicago.edu.
Leveraging a Shared Platform
CORPUS relies on the OCHRE database platform, which provides an online research environment that is shared by many different researchers in many disciplines while being customized for their specific needs. A common platform avoids the need to create new software for every project, which is not financially sustainable.
In fact, CORPUS is uniquely affordable and scalable, with the capacity to support a large number of projects, publications, and collections. This is possible because a single, customizable database platform yields large economies of scale for the expensive task of writing, debugging, and upgrading software.
A New Era of Academic Publishing
CORPUS enables scholars to publish their data on the Web for others to use. The data and accompanying argumentation can be presented in ways that transcend the traditional book-and-page format. CORPUS publications are more than just e-books or PDF’s.
Data can be published informally via a self-published website generated automatically from the OCHRE platform. Researchers also have to option to publish more formally, under the imprint of the University of Chicago. These formal CORPUS publications are intended to meet the standards required for academic promotion. They, too, take the form of websites generated automatically from the OCHRE platform, but they are peer reviewed and professionally edited and are given ISBN numbers and catalogued in libraries. Once published, their content does not change and they remain accessible and citable on the Web over the long term.
CORPUS publications are overseen by an editorial board consisting of leading scholars in a range of fields. The University of Chicago Press is represented on the CORPUS editorial board and provides guidance concerning best practices for academic publishing and peer review.
Other academic publishers who want to use the CORPUS platform are invited to contact us at corpus@uchicago.edu.
An Affordable Non-Profit Service
CORPUS is a non-profit service that spans a wide range of digital efforts at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, including active research projects, peer-reviewed publications of research results, and library collections of research data. There is no annually recurring subscription fee but just a one-time fee payment whose amount depends on the number of research collaborators or authors and the size and complexity of their 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.
Acknowledgments
CORPUS was established with the generous financial support of Mr. Paul Funk of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a cooperative endeavor of the University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Library, and Press.