Dear colleagues,

Our team from the Data Curation Network seeks input from users, staff, curators, and directors at US-based data repositories (disciplinary, government, institutional, and general) to help us better understand (1) the level of data curation provided by your data repository and (2) what you perceive as the most important value-add that data curation has on the data sharing process.

By data curation, we mean the various actions that may be taken to ensure that data are fit for purpose and available for discovery and reuse.

Your participation in this 10-minute survey will help establish which data curation actions are commonly in practice across various types of data repositories and any perceived value these actions have on the data sharing process. With your help, the results of this survey will better enable data repositories to benchmark curation actions in a meaningful way and to make evidence-based decisions regarding the value proposition of doing data curation at one level versus another.

What to expect: You will be asked to define the “level of curation” taken by a specific data repository and share any perceived value that you feel this work adds to the resulting data product.

Begin survey now: https://umn.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eXWyGcIvwisAesl

Disclaimer and data sharing: There are no incentives for your participation nor penalties for lack of participation. Survey responses will be collected anonymously and all effort will be made to protect the identity of the respondent. To encourage honest feedback, the identity of the data repository will not be tied to participant-level responses. A deidentified dataset of participant-level responses to this study will be published for open and long-term reuse in the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (http://z.umn.edu/drum) within six months of the survey close. This research was reviewed by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board as STUDY00011146.

Credits: This survey is authored by members of the Data Curation Network, an alliance of US-based academic and non-profit data repositories that share a mission to help researchers ethically share their research data.

Thank you on behalf of the survey authors:
Sophia Lafferty-Hess, Duke University
Hannah Hadley, Penn State University
Renata Curty, University of California, Santa Barbara
Hoa Luong, University of Illinois
Susan Braxton, University of Illinois
Jonathan Petters, Virginia Tech University
Jake Carlson, University of Michigan
Wendy Kozlowski, Cornell University
Lisa Johnston, University of Minnesota