Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative - Association of Research Libraries

"Public access to research data is critical to advancing science and solving real world problems. In recent years a number of funding agencies have required 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 have developed and launched infrastructure to support faculty in these requirements. These services are often spread across the institution and housed in various administrative units, such as campus 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.

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 project addresses 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?..."