Dataverse Going Global: Expanding an International Data‑Sharing Community

by Colleen Walsh

Researchers and staff from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard traveled to Barcelona, Spain and Riga, Latvia in May 2026, coming together with members of a worldwide community built around Dataverse, the open source data repository software created and developed at IQSS, with help from the Dataverse community.

When the Dataverse Project launched more than two decades ago at IQSS it had an ambitious mandate: democratize access to data by helping scientists and researchers curate and control their research data in a streamlined and efficient manner, and to help them share it widely to support open, reproducible science.

The success of that mission is clear on the project’s website, where 150 orange dots on a map mark institutions or collections of organizations that have adopted the data-sharing platform. From the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya to DataverseNO (Norway’s national generalist research data repository)­­ to the Peking University Open Research Data Platform, scholars across the globe are using the Harvard-developed platform to openly share discoveries and collaborate on world-changing research.

“Dataverse is an open source software, which means anybody can install it,” said Sonia Barbosa, the associate director of Dataverse support, data curation, and the Murray Archive. “But you only get on our Dataverse map if you are following the higher mission that we have, which is to build a community of these repositories, almost federated in a way, that promotes and shares open data. Today we truly have a community of coders, developers, and curators all working together to address data-sharing needs.”

And that community likes to connect. Last month people from around the globe came together, as they have for more than a decade, to talk about their engagement with Dataverse, how they are working with it, enhancing it, and supporting the thriving, growing network of users it has engendered.

The rise of a global community

The first official Dataverse Community Meeting convened at IQSS in 2015, said Barbosa, who has played a key role in organizing the annual conferences for the past 12 years.

“We had a big enough community of researchers, librarians, archivists, publishers, funders, developers, and others interested in data sharing that we decided we should have a meeting focused on the software,” said Barbosa. The meeting was wide-ranging in scope, she added, “exploring what kind of features and interoperability the software should have, what the community was doing in terms of research data sharing, and how communities were coming together to talk about best practices and FAIR, the set of guiding principles ensuring data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.”

The first gathering was so successful that organizers have sponsored an annual meeting ever since. From 2015 to 2019 the conference was held at Harvard. The outbreak of COVID-19 drove the meeting online from 2020 to 2022. But the pandemic didn’t stop people from adopting and interacting with the program—in fact, it did the opposite.

“I remember the activity around Dataverse really increasing in those years. Everybody was online, and it seemed to me like more and more was being done than ever,” said Barbosa. “So there was a lot of growth during and after the pandemic, and we had already been talking about regional meetings, because so many of our installations were overseas.”

A review of meeting locales and hosts in recent years highlights Dataverse’s wide reach and appeal. The first regional community meeting outside the U.S. was in 2023 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. The 2024 meeting was held at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El Batán, Mexico. The following year it was hosted by the University of North Carolina, the second adopter of the program after Harvard, at its Research Data Management Core.

Bienvenidos

In May 2026, 226 participants from around the world traveled or connected virtually to this year’s meeting held in Spain and hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, a group that specializes in high-performance computing and manages MareNostrum, the country’s most powerful supercomputer. The four-day meeting featured 120 oral presentations, including nine keynote addresses, seven plenary talks, and six discussion sessions. There were also 60 conference posters and three technical demonstrations.

A key theme for the 2026 Community Meeting involved Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many sessions focused on how artificial intelligence could enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of repository workflows. Another top area of discussion was interoperability and examining how “to enable richer linkage and reuse across datasets, domains, and platforms,” said IQSS Interim Director of Data Science and Product Research Ceilyn Boyd.

Also on this year’s agenda was how to address sensitive information.

“Something that’s very important to this community right now is sensitive data: data sets that may have health and medical data, or genomic information,” said Boyd. “There are other types of sensitivities too that people don’t typically think about, such as environmental sensitivity. For instance, you may be studying a highly protected type of manatee, or flora, or cultural artifact, and you really need to protect them and their location, so they aren’t further endangered.”

“To me the conference highlighted just how rich this ecosystem is in terms of use cases, in terms of knowledge, skill, and this expertise coming together in order to solve these infrastructural issues related to stewardship of research objects—in this case, data—but also sharing and promulgating information to move science forward.”

For IQSS research associate Danny Ebanks, a Dataverse team member who has a background in statistics, machine learning, and quantitative methodology, his first trip to an international community meeting didn’t disappoint. While he said he has long known his work helps scholars find “the data they need to conduct cutting-edge research that will ultimately accelerate science and help solve society's problems,” Ebanks was still surprised by the depth of inquiry around Dataverse itself. “At this meeting what was so remarkable was to see this whole subfield of data management science that is just focused on the Dataverse … as if this seed that was planted 20 years ago has grown into an entire ecosystem of a new research field.”

He was also inspired by seeing hundreds of people from around the world who are “truly passionate about this particular infrastructure,” come together to discuss important questions about the Dataverse and AI, long-standing issues of curation, and data privacy. “Having all of those concerns in one space, being discussed so enthusiastically, was a really rewarding experience,” said Ebanks, “and I think we learned a lot from that.”

A Latvian state of mind, and data

Part of the IQSS Dataverse team made an additional stop in Riga, Latvia, for a series of meetings to mark the first anniversary of DataverseLV, a nationwide installation established by four of the country’s largest universities: Riga Technical University, Riga Stradiņš University, the University of Latvia (LU), and Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies.

Dataverse software developer Phil Durbin, who delivered a presentation on how to navigate Dataverse, said he was impressed by how quickly the organizers of DataverseLV were able to gain the CoreTrustSeal stamp of approval – an international community-based certification granted to trustworthy data repositories. Within a year of making inquiries about the platform, the group had set up an installation and ensured it met the rigorous professional standards required to securely manage, preserve, and provide long-term access to research and digital data needed for the accreditation.

“They were very organized, and they seemed to understand this CoreTrustSeal certification could help guide them to a better outcome for everybody,” said Durbin.

“I was also impressed by how they studied other groups, especially DataverseNO from Norway, talking with them and following their lead,” he added. “I'm always proud to see more and more adoption of our platform around the world. I think there's so much we can all learn from each other.”

Durbin was also thrilled that the group in Latvia is offering up its repository as intended by its developers at IQSS, as a place for researchers whose data might not have a natural home. “This is a very common thing for Dataverse. It’s what is sometimes called a generalist repository, which in a sense means that we will take anything, especially any data where there’s not a good place for it.”

Gustavo Durand, a former Dataverse project manager who also presented during the recent meetings in Riga, said he was impressed with how quickly DataverseLV came together. He praised his Latvian counterparts and reflected on the work that he and his Harvard colleagues have done in the past years to help streamline the process for those adopting the program.

“I give credit mostly to them, but it's also a sign of the maturity of the documentation that we've been working on over the past 20 years,” said Durand, adding, “I think we've done a good job of making it easier for groups to pick it up and run on their own without needing too much handholding.”

For Barbosa, who delivered a keynote address on data rescue during the Latvian meetings, seeing the community grow has been its own special reward. “I remember in 2019 when everybody thought the pandemic would stall progress on each and every thing, we were at 79 installations,” she said. “So today to see it at 150 installations, you really appreciate the impact, and you see how it gives people an opportunity to create something for their communities.”

Dataverse Community Meeting photo credit: Dwayne Liburd; Riga photo credit: Phil Durbin