IQSS and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication have launched the Open Data Assistance Program (ODAP) at Harvard.
ODAP is a program that aims to help Harvard scholars make their research data more accessible. It will offer advice and instruction on how to deposit data files in the Harvard Dataverse. When privacy is an issue, ODAP will offer advice on how to make data files as open as privacy constraints will allow. Since anyone in the world may deposit in Dataverse, ODAP’s online assistance should help researchers everywhere. However, when online assistance isn’t enough, ODAP staffers and volunteers will offer personal assistance to Harvard faculty, students, fellows, and postdocs. ODAP encourages other institutions to offer personal assistance to their own researchers as well, and can work with them on how to do that.
ODAP is run by the Dataverse and Data Curation teams at IQSS Data Science, in conjunction with an Advisory Board that includes members of the Harvard Library, as well as scholars from the Harvard community interested in open science and data sharing.The ODAP Advisory Board is coordinated by Mercè Crosas, Director of Data Science at IQSS, and Peter Suber, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication.
Beginning on April 20, hands-on training will be available at ODAP. In these workshops, users will learn how to prepare their data sets before publishing them to Dataverse and how to best use the new features of Dataverse 4.0. ODAP also offers weekly open office hours to help answer questions about sharing data, and getting started with Dataverse.
