Publicly Shared Data: A Gap Analysis of Researcher Actions and Institutional Support throughout the Data Life Cycle.

In recent years, the landscape of research data management and sharing has undergone significant transformation. This transformation, significantly influenced by the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Holdren Memo and further reinforced by the 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo, has increased transparency and accessibility in academic research across the United States and has led the largest federal funders of academic research to mandate public access to funded research output. This shift has placed a substantial responsibility on institutions, which are now tasked with not only stewarding research data but also ensuring compliance with the conditions of externally awarded grants to individual researchers at their institutions. To meet these new requirements, institutions have invested in the development and maintenance of robust infrastructure and services for data management and sharing. Understanding how researchers manage and share data, and whether or not they use institutional services or external resources towards these activities, is vital for institutions aiming to make informed decisions in enhancing their data sharing infrastructure.

This report provides the results of research conducted at six academic institutions as part of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant “Completing the Lifecycle: Developing Evidence-Based Models of Research Data Sharing” (#2135874), under the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative. Administrators with expenditure knowledge of their units, and whose units provide data management and sharing (DMS) support to researchers, were surveyed on precisely what services and activities their units provide to enable data sharing. Funded researchers at these same six institutions were also surveyed on what activities they do or do not do, with or without institutional or external support, to enable sharing of their research data. This report highlights where service gaps may exist between researchers’ needs and what services and support institutions provide. From this analysis, we determined several DMS activities that could use more institutional support, either by specific service providers or as cross-institution efforts, or activities that are underutilized by researchers.

Our primary findings are as follows:
• Nearly half of researchers reported not identifying data management and sharing costs in the planning phase of their grant budgets. Making data publicly available comes at a cost, and appropriately planning for resource allocation increases the chances of generating well-documented and reusable research data.
• Researchers could benefit from existing institutional support for several data management and sharing activities. This includes support for: assessing research data security, from IT offices; ensuring funding agency requirements for data sharing have been met, from central research offices; creating persistent identifiers (PIDs) for shared datasets, from research libraries; making decisions about de-accessioning and removal of research data; and budgeting for data management and sharing costs, from cross-institutional efforts.
• Researchers completed the majority of data management and sharing activities themselves, and relied much less on internal and external support. For 20 of the 26 data management and sharing activities researchers were asked about, 70% or more researchers who did that activity reported that they conducted it themselves or within their research group.
• Administrators from research institutes and specialized centers in half of the institutions participating in this survey reported offering support for all 27 data management and sharing activities administrators were asked about, across the research life cycle.

Our recommendations are as follows:
• Previous reports have indicated the importance of forming institution-wide research data management working groups or committees. Once formed, these working groups should focus on coordinating efforts to increase data sharing services and infrastructure efficiencies across the institution.
• Research institutes and specialized centers can provide an opportunity for institutions to pilot or experiment with a wide range of data sharing services and infrastructure to evaluate cost and impact before implementing these at scale/institution-wide.
• Research libraries can and do play an integral role in institutions’ ability to meet requirements for public access to research data. Data sharing services provided by research libraries may be underutilized and could benefit from increased campus outreach and messaging from funder representatives to seek these services out at their local institutions.

We encourage other research institutions to conduct similar institutional investigations of data sharing support and researcher data sharing activities. Such studies are instrumental in identifying key support units, pinpointing service gaps in institutional research data management and sharing support, and conducting targeted outreach to increase researchers’ adoption of this support. These gap analyses not only offer a snapshot of the current state of local DMS support, but also serve as a critical foundation for enhancing the coordination of research data management support across institutions.