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21 August 2008

Credit for making data available

For those who have collected research data and made it available to others, its nice when people thank you. But it would be nicer to receive formal scholarly citation credit and web visibility for your hard work. The Dataverse Network project is designed to get you that credit and visibility.

The idea is to give you a free "dataverse" (your view of the universe of data) -- which is a virtual archive where you can store, permanently preserve, and distribute your data (or list data from other dataverses) with everyone or only those you approve. Your dataverse is branded as yours, with the look and feel of your web site and on your web site, but since it is served out by an installation of the Dataverse Network at Harvard you needn't install any software or hardware. Some other features include:

• Safe and permanent data storage in preservation format branded as yours.
• No need to translate data when statistical software formats change.
• Can be easily re-branded if you move institutions, but either way will never be lost.
• Formal citation credit for your data, including a globally unique identifier and universal numeric fingerprint.
• Establish an unbreakable link between your data and related published work.
• Easy ways for others to find your data and associated scholarship.
• Share your data with everyone, or those who sign your licensing agreement, or only individuals or groups you approve.
• Allow users to subset, recode, and download your data in any format
• Run many advanced statistical methods via a GUI on-line.

For an example, go to my homepage at http://gking.harvard.edu and click on dataverse. To get your own dataverse, go to the IQSS Dataverse Network, http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu. For more information on our open source Dataverse Network project, see http://TheData.org.

Posted by Gary King at August 21, 2008 10:24 AM