A lot of engagement work with researchers centers around supporting their efforts to make the data underlying their research publicly available. It’s a critical step to advancing science and increasingly a requirement from different funders and publishers. Institutions have responded by developing and offering a variety of services to support their researchers. So how well are these services working? And how much are they costing?

The Realities of Academic Data Sharing, or RADS, Initiative is investigating these questions. Their project, supported by an NSF EAGER grant, is looking at three research questions: 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 finally, what is the cost to the institution to implement the federally mandated public access to research data policy?

Cynthia Hudson Vitale is the Director, Scholars and Scholarship at the Association of Research Libraries.

 Shawna Taylor is the Project Manager for the Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) initiative at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). In addition to managing the RADS project, Shawna is part of the research team of RADS, is an active member of the DCN, serving on numerous committees and interest groups, and contributes to other ARL work related to public access of research data.

Jake Carlson (@jrcarlso) is the Director of the Deep Blue Repository and Research Data Services (DBRRDS) department at the University of Michigan (U-M) Library. DBRRDS oversees the Library’s two institutional repositories: Deep Blue Documents, for articles, dissertations, presentations and other human-readable materials, and Deep Blue Data, for data sets and other machine-readable materials generated by the U-M community. Carlson’s work centers on developing and supporting services to publish materials of scholarly value that do not have a home in traditional publication structures, including research data, following FAIR and ethical practices. Carlson has authored or co-authored more than 20 articles on research data services in libraries. He is a co-editor, with Lisa Johnston, of the book "Data information Literacy: Librarians, Data and the Education of a New Generation of Researchers" published in 2015 by the Purdue University Press.

Jonathon Petters (@jon_petters) As Assistant Director of Data Management and Curation Services, Jonathan Petters supervises a team that provides research data management planning, training, and curation support, and including geospatial data services, to researchers across Virginia Tech through the University Libraries.

Resources Mentioned:

More info about the RADS initiative: https://www.arl.org/realities-of-academic-data-sharing-rads-initiative/

Data Services at Virginia Tech: https://lib.vt.edu/research-teaching/data-services.html and https://data.lib.vt.edu