New Report From the Association of Research Libraries (ARL): “Publicly Shared Data: A Gap Analysis of Researcher Actions and Institutional Support throughout the Data Life Cycle”

From the Association of Research Libraries:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released Publicly Shared Data: A Gap Analysis of Researcher Actions and Institutional Support throughout the Data Life Cycle, a report from the Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative.

ARL and six academic institutions involved in the Data Curation Network (DCN) were awarded a 2021 US National Science Foundation (NSF) EAGER grant to conduct research, develop models, and collect costing information for public access to research data from funded researchers. This project is the RADS Initiative. The six RADS institutions are Cornell University, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis.

This new report from the RADS Initiative highlights where service gaps may exist between researchers’ data-sharing needs and the services and support provided by institutions. The report is based on data from two sources within the six RADS institutions:

• Administrators with expenditure knowledge of their units, and whose units provide data management and sharing (DMS) support to researchers, were surveyed on precisely what services and activities their units provide to enable data sharing.
• Funded researchers were surveyed on what activities they do or do not do, with or without institutional or external support, to enable sharing of their research data.

This report is particularly relevant for institutions developing strategies to support researchers effectively and efficiently in response to existing and forthcoming federal mandates on data sharing. It is also useful in institutional planning for resource allocation of research data management and sharing services towards compliance as well as broader open science objectives

Authors

Jake Carlson
University at Buffalo

Lizhao Ge
George Washington University

Alicia Hofelich Mohr
University of Minnesota

Jonathan Petters
Virginia Tech

Shawna Taylor
Association of Research Libraries

Direct to Full Text Report
DOI: 10.29242/report.radsgapanalysis2024
51 pages; PDF

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access