Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses

Over the last 15 years, an increasing number of US funding agencies have required the management and broad sharing of research data1 and other related research outputs to accelerate the impacts of their investments. In response, many academic institutions have built and maintained services and infrastructure to comply with these policies. These resources are often spread across the institution, housed in various administrative units, such as campus IT, the university libraries, and the research office, among others. Given this distributed nature, the total institutional cost of public access to research data has not been well understood. This lack of data on expenses makes strategic planning for research data services and support particularly difficult given the increased scope of research data management and sharing (DMS) services expected as a result of the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.”2 To begin to address this need, research conducted as part of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant “Completing the Lifecycle: Developing Evidence-Based Models of Research Data Sharing” (#2135874) collected expense information from six academic institutions. Expense information on data management and sharing activities was collected from institutional units, including the library, IT, research offices, and other institutes and centers for fiscal year 2021– 2022. We also retrospectively assessed expenses for federally funded researchers over the life cycle of selected federal awards that required compliance with DMS requirements. Together, these costs represent total institutional expenses for implementing data management and sharing.