Sustaining Domain Repositories for Digital Data: A Call for Change from an Interdisciplinary Working Group of Domain Repositories

Abstract

In February 2013, the U.S. Government's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum calling for all federal agencies funding data collection to create plans for public access to research projects. On June 24-25, 2013, representatives from 22 data repositories spanning the social and natural sciences met in Ann Arbor, MI. The meeting, organized by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, created a space to discuss the challenges facing repositories across domains, and to strategize around issues of sustainability. Attendees endorsed a unified call for change, stating that domain repositories must be funded as the essential piece of the U.S. research infrastructure that they are.