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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. 

This is a story about the challenges and opportunities that surfaced while answering a deceptively complex question - where's the data? As faculty and researchers publish articles, datasets, and other research outputs to meet promotion and tenure requirements, address federal funding policies, and institutional open access and data sharing policies, many online locations for publishing these materials have developed over time. How can we capture where all of the research generated on an academic campus is shared and preserved? This presentation will discuss how our multi-institution collaboration, the Reality of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative, sought to answer this question. We programmatically pulled DOIs from DataCite and CrossRef, making the naive assumption that these platforms, the two predominant DOI registration agencies for US data, would present us with a neutral and unbiased view of where data from our affiliated researchers were shared. However, as we dug into the data, we found inconsistencies in the use and completeness of the necessary metadata fields for our questions, as well as differences in how DOIs were assigned across repositories. Additionally, we recognized the systematic and privileged bias introduced by our choice of data sources. Specifically, while DataCite and CrossRef provide easy discovery of research outputs because they aggregate DOIs, they are also costly commercial services. Many repositories that cannot afford such services or lack local staffing and knowledge required to use these services are left out of the technology that has recently been labeled “global research infrastructure”. Our presentation will identify the challenges we encountered in conducting this research specifically around finding the data, and cleaning and interpreting the data. We will further engage the audience in a discussion around increasing representation in the global research infrastructure to discover and account for more research outputs. 

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.