Public access to research data is vital to advancing science and solving real-world problems. Recently a number of US funding agencies have required the management and broad sharing of research data to accelerate the impacts of their investments. In response, many research institutions launched services and infrastructure to support researchers with these requirements. However, these services are often spread across the institution and housed in various administrative units. Given this distributed nature, coordination of data management and sharing (DMS) services is often informal and the costs of public access to research data are not well understood.
In 2021 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and six academic institutions involved in the Data Curation Network (DCN) were awarded a US National Science Foundation (NSF) EAGER grant to conduct research, develop models, and collect costing information for public access to research data across from funded researchers in five disciplinary areas: environmental science, materials science, psychology, biomedical sciences, and physics. This project is the Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative.
Today the RADS Initiative has released two reports: Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses and the supplemental report, Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative: Research Methodology 2022–2023 Surveys and Interviews.
Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses is the culmination of analyzed expense data collected from:
- Institutional units, including libraries, IT departments, research offices, and other institutes and centers, for fiscal year 2021–2022
- Retrospective data for expenses of federally funded researchers, over the grant life cycle, of selected federal awards that required compliance with DMS requirements
This report presents data on the average yearly cost of DMS activities for institutional units, as well as direct DMS expenses incurred by researchers per funded research project. These expenses were then analyzed together, showing an average combined overall cost of $2,500,000 (with total institutional expenses ranging from approximately $800,000 to over $6,000,000).
The RADS Initiative is managed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in collaboration with the Data Curation Network (DCN). This project was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation EAGER grant #2135874.
About the Association of Research Libraries
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of research libraries in Canada and the US whose vision is to create a trusted, equitable, and inclusive research and learning ecosystem and prepare library leaders to advance this work in strategic partnership with member libraries and other organizations worldwide. ARL’s mission is to empower and advocate for research libraries and archives to shape, influence, and implement institutional, national, and international policy. ARL develops the next generation of leaders and enables strategic cooperation among partner institutions to benefit scholarship and society. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.
About the Data Curation Network
The Data Curation Network (DCN) is a membership organization of institutional and nonprofit data repositories whose vision is to advance open research by making data more ethical, reusable, and understandable. The DCN’s mission is to empower researchers to publish high-quality data in an ethical and FAIR way, collaboratively advance the art and science of data curation by creating, adopting, and openly sharing best practices, and supporting thoughtful, innovative, and inclusive data-curation training and professional development opportunities. The DCN is based at the University of Minnesota. Learn more at datacurationnetwork.org.
About the US National Science Foundation
The US National Science Foundation propels the nation forward by advancing fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. NSF supports research and people by providing facilities, instruments and funding to support their ingenuity and sustain the US as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2023 budget of $9.5 billion, NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities, and institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 40,000 competitive proposals and makes about 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with industry, Arctic and Antarctic research and operations, and US participation in international scientific efforts.
