On the Harvard Dataverse Network Project (and why it’s awesome) | OKF Open Science Working Group

I am a huge fan of grass-roots approaches to scholarly openness. Successful community-led initiatives tend to speak directly to that community’s need and can grow by attracting interest from members on the fringes (just look at the success of the arXiv, for example). But these kinds of projects tend to be smaller scale and can be difficult to sustain, especially without any institutional backing or technical support. This is why the Harvard Dataverse Network is so great: it facilitates research data sharing through a sustainable, scalable, open-source platform maintained by the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard. This means it is sustainable through institutional backing, but also empowers individual communities to manage their own research data.  In essence, a Dataverse is simply a data repository, but one that is both free to use and fully customisable according to a community’s need. In the project’s own words:   ‘A Dataverse is a container for research data studies, customized and managed by its owner. A study is a container for a research data set. It includes cataloging information, data files and complementary files.’ There are a number of ways in which the Dataverse Network can be used to enable Open Data ..."