An official website of the United States government
The last 15 years have seen a marked growth of data management and sharing policies among federal agencies in the US and Canada. While these policies have an undeniable impact in terms of increased publicly available datasets, they have also impacted the research practices of funded researchers and the services and infrastructure provided by institutions. Researchers and institutions alike share the responsibility to align practices with funding agency requirements concerning data management and sharing, but each stakeholder group has responded in ways that may not align with one another. This presentation delves into research resulting from the National Science Foundation-funded Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative and provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of services and infrastructure of six academic institutions, as well as an overview of the overall impact of these policies for researchers and institutions. Insights into services, infrastructure, and impact can lead to the creation of streamlined pathways for enhancing institutional efficiencies in data management and sharing.
more »
« less
COGR, FDP, and ARL: Putting Numbers Behind Institutional Expenses for Public Access to Research Data
As data management and sharing policies have expanded in the federal and private funding spheres, the costs to support institutions and researchers in meeting these expenses for services and infrastructure are not fully understood. A number of higher education organizations are conducting research and developing tactics for cost assessments of infrastructure and services distributed within institutions. This panel will present a snapshot of work recently started at the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), the Council of Government Relations (COGR), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to investigate where public access to research data costs are incurred at an institution, with the goal of assisting universities in defining a strategy for planning for those costs.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2135874
- PAR ID:
- 10420976
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Coalition for Networked Information
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Institutions have made significant investments to support public access to research data requirements; yet have little comparative data about these services, infrastructure, and costs. To address this need, the research team undertook a mixed-methods approach to understand the institution-wide expenses for research data management and sharing and began to draft an expense model for data management and sharing. This model is further useful for institutions that provide research data management and sharing.more » « less
-
The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have collaborated and led national discussions to improve public access to data resulting from federally funded research. As part of the NSF-funded (NSF # 1939279) Accelerating Public Access to Research Data Initiative, AAU and APLU convened representatives from the university teams at an Acceleration Conference in 2020 and facilitated two national Summits to help universities create robust systems for ensuring effective public access to high-quality research data and develop the current Guide. The Guide has been informed by 261 campus representatives from 111 institutions, representatives from several federal agencies, and other key stakeholders. The Guide is designed to help institutions develop and promote systems to support sharing of research data. It provides advice concerning actions that can be taken to improve access to research data on campuses. It also contains information about the infrastructure and support that may be required to facilitate data access, and it offers specific examples of how various institutions are approaching challenges to sharing research data and results.more » « less
-
Abstract Research universities rely heavily on external funding to advance knowledge and generate economic growth. In the USA, tens of billions of dollars are spent each year on research and development with the federal government contributing over half of these funds. Yet a decline in relative federal funding highlights the role of other funders and their varying contractual terms. Specifically, nonfederal funders provide lower recovery of indirect costs. Using project-level university-sponsored research administrative records from four institutions, we examine indirect cost recovery. We find significant variation in the amount of indirect funding recovered—both across and within funders, as well as to different academic fields within a university. The distribution of sponsors in the overall research funding portfolio also impacts indirect cost recovery. The recovery variation has important implications for the sustainability and cross-subsidization of the university research enterprise. Together, our results show where universities are under-recovering indirect costs.more » « less
-
Synopsis Equity and inclusivity in STEM research has become a larger topic of discussion in recent years; however, researchers and scientists with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses are often missing from these conversations. Further, while field research is a major research component for some STEM disciplines, it is unclear what accessibility barriers or accommodations exist across the field sciences. Field research can sometimes involve harsh environments, topography, and weather that present challenges to those with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses. A large and coinciding obstacle standing in the way of field research accessibility is the ableism present across science and academia, resulting in and from a lack of prioritization of attention and funding from universities and institutions. Biological field stations have been shown to be valuable not only as infrastructure for field-based research, but also as providing resources toward the scientific education of students and scientific outreach initiatives for the general public. As such, biological field stations are perfectly positioned to reduce barriers in research inclusion and accessibility for students and scientists with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses. The current work presents the results of a survey meant to inventory the presence or absence of accessible infrastructure across field stations, with responses spanning six countries and 24 US states. Our results highlight a number of accessibility deficits in areas such as accessible entrances, kitchens, and bathrooms. Our results suggest that (1) biological field stations have significant variability in accessibility with significant deficits, especially in non-public-facing buildings used primarily by staff and researchers, and (2) field stations would benefit from an increase in federal funding opportunities to expedite their progress toward compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards. We propose potential solutions to field work infrastructure spanning a range of financial costs, with emphasis on the point that efforts toward accessibility do not require an “all-or-nothing” approach, and that any step toward accessibility will make field stations more inclusive. Additionally, we further suggest that federal funding sources, such as the NSF and NIH, as well as university leadership, should consider broadening diversity initiatives to promote the continuation of, and increased accessibility of, university-affiliated field stations.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
