EAGER: Completing the Lifecycle: Developing Evidence Based Models of Research Data Sharing

Effective data sharing practices are vital for the success of scientific research, especially in the emerging context of Open Science principles. This project will conduct a detailed analysis of data sharing activities in several specific institutional and organizational contexts in order to better understand the patterns, practices, costs, barriers, and workflows that support public access to research data.

The project is being undertaken with coordination between several major associations which are key supporters of scientific research in the United States. Many academic institutions provide infrastructure to support researchers in data sharing activities. These services and infrastructures are often distributed across the institution, housed in various administrative units, such as campus IT, the university libraries, and the research office, among others.

Given this distributed and often undocumented ad hoc nature, the true costs of public access to research data is not well understood. This project is designed to illuminate many of the currently unknown factors about the institutional landscape for public access to research data.

The technical aspects of this analysis project are as follows. An assessment of research data repository use patterns will be accomplished by analyzing metadata harvested by means of the DataCite application programming interface (API). A retrospective study of discipline-specific and format-specific research data practices will be accomplished utilizing a NIST-based institutional functional model for public access to research data applied to a series of institutions and sub-disciplines.

Finally, financial data will be collected and analyzed from the institutions using a combination of NAS and NIST cost models to consistently compare costs of data sharing activities and thereby produce a generalizable understanding of institutional expenditures.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.