A major trend in scholarly communications is the publication and dissemination of the datasets supporting scholarly research and publication. Publishing datasets alongside scholarly papers will increasingly become the norm. As the White House promotes open data policies and federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) require the submission of data management plans, we can expect the curation of research data to become a central activity of research librarianship.
Data curation addresses the challenge of ensuring reproducible and redistributable data as well as archiving datasets for the long term. Members of the scholarly communication team can advise you about how best to encode and preserve your data using international standards such as the Documentation Data Initiative (DDI). We can also recommend appropriate repositories for your research data. Learn more in the data management and curation research guide.
Our librarians are also committed to providing you with datasets to support your teaching and research. A research guide provides essential information about accessing shared datasets. We will also gladly assist you with locating sources of data relevant to your particular research agenda.
