The third domain is the public domain. At this point, the research is !finished" in the
sense that the resulting publications (and possibly linked data objects) are available
for public viewing. The documents will probably be made available through a
traditional (if one can use the term for something that has probably been in existence
less than five years) institutional repository. The associated data objects will need to
be lodged in a public data repository. This may or may not be the same system as
the institutional repository. In terms of the curation continua, the publication domain
is characterised by having more metadata than the collaboration domain, fewer
items again, smaller objects that are almost certainly static or derived snapshots,
organisational management, more preservation, open access and exposure of
metadata for harvesting.
It should be noted that there is no necessary one-one relationship between domains
and repositories. It would be theoretically possible to support all three domains from
a single repository instance, but in practice the requirements of the different curation
continua would make this extremely difficult. This is because the differing sorts of
objects that might be stored in a repository can vary widely. In addition, there are
characteristics of the management of and access to these objects that also differ.
These differences cannot easily be accommodated from a common repository
infrastructure. This is particularly true once one moves from a repository of
publications and discrete objects to a repository that might also contain data (of
widely varying sizes) generated by e-research.