Getting started with the Yoda portal

Logging in

Go to https://leiden-yoda.irods.surfsara.nl/

Log in using the “Sign in” button. You will be prompted for your email address. If you are an employee or student at Universiteit Leiden, your username is your primary email address (in lowercase). You will be forwarded to the familiar ULCN login page. External users have usually received their username via email, along with a link to set their password.

Users with a Leiden University account have to log in with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Overview of the Yoda Portal

Group Manager

Yoda allows you to store your valuable research data securely. The data is kept in data compartments, which can only be accessed by members.

The Group Manager can be used to view a list of data compartments and their members. People with a “group manager” role can add members to a data compartment, remove them, and change their roles.

See: Managing groups, users, and access rights

Your data in the Yoda Portal

Each group in Yoda has two main folders:

Research

The main folder (“research-…”) contains current research data that researchers collaborate on. Data is kept in subfolders. The subfolders can be organized according to the needs of the researcher.

You can also drag and drop files to your research folder.

Archiving

After completion of a study, the data in that subfolder can be deposited so that it is kept for 10 years or longer. Use the “Submit” button to deposit the subfolder. This will copy the contents of the subfolder to the Vault folder as a new data package. Before doing so, the subfolder must be described with metadata, which can be entered by clicking on the Metadata button.

For more information on metadata in Yoda see: Yoda Metadata.

Vault

The folder named “vault-…” contains deposited data packages. Once deposited, data cannot be removed. Therefore, the vault can be used to account for data in a research project to comply with FAIR principles.

Publishing

Researchers can opt to (but do not have to) publish any of the vault deposited data packages to make the metadata description of a data package known to the research community at large. Yoda adds a DOI persistent identifier to published data so that the data package can be cited and found in catalogues such as Datacite, Zenodo, B2Find etcetera. If (and only if) the data has been classified as “open” then the content itself can be downloaded by anyone from the internet. Otherwise, only the metadata description can be viewed.