> 
> On May 17, 2022, at 3:06 PM, Collin Schwantes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> My organization was part of a major viral discovery research project funded
> by USAID ~3 years ago. The systems for making that data available need to
> be documented and updated and I'm wondering if there are any grants or orgs
> that commonly fund that type of work.
> 
> thanks!
> 
> Collin

I know that there are groups that fund ‘data rescue’ efforts, but they tend to be field specific, so you’d have to look within the research community that would want to use the data that was collected.  They also tend to find data that is most ‘at risk’ of being lost… so older data on antiquated storage systems, or where the PI is nearing retirement (or already retired).

You might also try searching for ‘data curation’ grants in the discipline, as they’re often scoped for documentation efforts and possibly format / media refreshes.  Sometimes you can find them in adjacent research communities if the data might have re-use potential, by documenting it for that other community to be able to use it.

Besides the research discipline that would use the data, also check the original funding body; they sometimes have data grants available to their past PIs (so that good research that they’ve funded doesn’t get lost).

And I don’t want to be rude about this, but I’m honestly surprised that the initial proposal didn’t have to spell out how they were going to handle this as part of the Data Management Plan for the initial proposal if it was only three years ago.  I thought most funding bodies were now requiring plans for data after it’s been collected.

If you don’t have continued funding to host it, I would look into getting it exported into some sort of static format and submit it to whatever archive will take it.  If your disciple doesn’t have an archive, you could try one of the more generic ones like Dryad or I think Figshare and Zenodo now take datasets.

… and if the researchers have no clue about any data / informatics efforts in their field, you can try the Research Data Alliance and see if they have a Community of Practice or an Interest Group that’s related to the discipline: https://rd-alliance.org/groups

(They don’t give grants; they’re more of a social infrastructure for data informatics folks to gather work on issues in their field; they have support from NSF, CODATA, EU, Australia, and others)

-Joe