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Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative, NSF-Funded Phase 1, 2021–2023

AI-generated illustration of an open book with graphs, charts, and maps flowing from its pages towards a globe.
“Research Data Sharing Illustration,” generated by OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, April 2024

In 2021, the Association of Research Libraries and six academic institutions involved in the Data Curation Network (DCN) were awarded a US National Science Foundation (NSF) EAGER grant (#2135874) to conduct research, develop models, and collect costing information for public access to research data across five disciplinary areas: environmental science, materials science, psychology, biomedical sciences, and physics.

This research was spurred on due to a number of funding agencies requiring the management and broad sharing of research data and other related research outputs to accelerate the impacts of their investments. In response, many academic institutions developed and launched infrastructure to support researchers in meeting these requirements. These services are often spread across the institution and housed in various administrative units, such as IT, the university libraries, and the research office, among others. Given this distributed nature, coordination of services is often informal and the true institutional cost of public access to research data is not well understood.

This phase of the project addressed the following research questions:

  1. Where are funded researchers across these institutions making their data publicly accessible and what is the quality of the metadata?
  2. How are researchers making decisions about why and how to share research data?
  3. What is the cost to the institution to implement the federally mandated public access to research data policy?

Participating institutions and co-PIs for phase one of the project were: Cornell University (co-PI Wendy Kozlowski), Duke University (co-PI Joel Herndon), University of Michigan (co-PI Jake Carlson), University of Minnesota (co-PI Alicia Hofelich Mohr), Virginia Tech (co-PI Jonathan Petters), and Washington University in St. Louis (co-PI Jennifer Moore). The PI for this phase was Cynthia Hudson Vitale and the project manager was Shawna Taylor, both at the Association of Research Libraries. 

The following are research outputs, project protocols, and project updates from the NSF-funded first phase of the RADS Initiative. For phase two project updates, see the RADS homepage.

Expenses for Public Access to Research Data

Data Management and Sharing Activities: Institutional Support and Researcher Practices

Mapping Institutional Support for Public Access to Research Data

Metadata Analysis: Finding Where Researchers are Sharing Their Data

Research Instruments, Protocols, Methodology, and Research Data

Project Updates

Research Team

  • Cynthia Hudson Vitale, Director, Science Policy and Scholarship, Association of Research Libraries (PI)
  • Jake Carlson, Associate University Librarian for Research, Collections and Outreach, University at Buffalo Libraries, University at Buffalo
  • Lizhao Ge, Statistician
  • Joel Herndon, Director of the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences, University Libraries, Duke University
  • Alicia Hofelich Mohr, Research Support Services Coordinator, University of Minnesota
  • Lisa Johnston, Director, Data Governance, University Wisconsin, Madison
  • Wendy Kozlowski, Director, Research Data and Open Scholarship, Cornell University Library, Cornell University
  • Jennifer Moore, Head of Data Services, University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Jonathan Petters, Assistant Director, Data Management & Curation Services, Data Services, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
  • Shawna Taylor, Project Manager, Open Science, Association of Research Libraries

Advisory Board

  • David Kennedy, Vice President and Director of Costing & Financial Compliance, Council on  Government Relations 
  • James Luther, Research Compliance Officer, Yale University & Strategic Advisor, Federal Demonstration Partnership
  • Mark Puente, Associate Dean for Organizational Development, Inclusion and Diversity,  Purdue University 
  • Kacy Redd, Associate Vice President of Research & STEM Education, Association of Public and Land Grant Universities
  • Tobin Smith, Vice President of Science Policy and International Issues, American Association of Universities
  • Tyler Walters, Dean, University Libraries, Virginia Tech
  • Martha Whitehead, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian, Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Affiliates

CNI
Library Copyright Alliance
IARLA