Data Sharing Readiness in Academic Institutions

Abstract

In 2017, several members of the Data Curation Network authored the Academic Research Libraries (ARL) Data Curation Spec Kit, a survey asking 124 academic research institutions in the United States and Canada to self-assess their data repository and curation services (Hudson-Vitale et al., 2017a). Three years later, institutional support for data sharing is as relevant as ever. Next month, the Association of Public Land Grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of American Universities (AAU) will convene a national summit in Washington, DC to address how public universities may increase public access to their research, particularly in light of funder and journal requirements supporting data reuse and research transparency. So, we wondered, how has the academic landscape for data repository and curation services changed? To answer this question, we used website content analysis – a method that has been used successfully in recent years for examining the broader category of academic library research data services offerings (Yoon and Schultz, 2015; Kouper, Fear, Ishida, Kollen, & WIlliams, 2017) – to better understand data repository services in academic research libraries, building on the 2017 Spec Kit results.