YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and six universities involved in the Data Curation Network a $297,019 grant to conduct research, develop models, and collect costing information for public access to research data across five disciplinary areas. The project, Completing the Life Cycle: Developing Evidence-Based Models of Research Data Sharing, will start in August 2021.

This project, funded by NSF’s Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program, will develop functional models and collect costing information for public access to research data within five disciplines—environmental science, materials science, psychology, biomedical sciences, and physics—and across six academic institutions—Cornell University, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis.

This work builds upon the ARL Scholars and Scholarship Committee’s engagement with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) work in the Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (APARD) project. Representatives from AAU, APLU, the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), and others will engage in the project as advisory committee members.

This research seeks to answer questions such as: Where are funded researchers across these institutions making their data publicly accessible and what is the quality of the metadata?; How are researchers making decisions about why and how to share research data?; and What is the cost to the institution to implement the federally mandated public access to research data policy?

To better understand the institutional perspective and challenges to providing public access to research data, this project will assess use of publicly accessible research data repositories in order to uncover which repositories funded researchers are most frequently using to share their research data by institution and discipline. Next, the team will conduct a retrospective study of discipline-specific and format-specific public-access research-data practices of faculty on academic campuses, to develop service- and infrastructure-based functional models for how public access to research data is taking place on academic campuses using institutional resources. A key part of this project will collect financial information on expenses related to public access to research data in order to pilot and test existing financial models for public access to research data, such as those used by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and in the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine biomedical-data costs report. The project will engage the broader academic research community in model feedback and costing strategies at strategic intervals to collectively work toward a sustainable functional and financial model for sharing research data.