Where's the data? A story of data discovery, cleaning, and equality

This is a story about the challenges and opportunities that surfaced while answering a deceptively complex question - where's the data? As faculty and researchers publish articles, datasets, and other research outputs to meet promotion and tenure requirements, address federal funding policies, and institutional open access and data sharing policies, many online locations for publishing these materials have developed over time. How can we capture where all of the research generated on an academic campus is shared and preserved? This presentation will discuss how our multi-institution collaboration, the Reality of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative, sought to answer this question. We programmatically pulled DOIs from DataCite and CrossRef, making the naive assumption that these platforms, the two predominant DOI registration agencies for US data, would present us with a neutral and unbiased view of where data from our affiliated researchers were shared. However, as we dug into the data, we found inconsistencies in the use and completeness of the necessary metadata fields for our questions, as well as differences in how DOIs were assigned across repositories. Additionally, we recognized the systematic and privileged bias introduced by our choice of data sources. Specifically, while DataCite and CrossRef provide easy discovery of research outputs because they aggregate DOIs, they are also costly commercial services. Many repositories that cannot afford such services or lack local staffing and knowledge required to use these services are left out of the technology that has recently been labeled “global research infrastructure”. Our presentation will identify the challenges we encountered in conducting this research specifically around finding the data, and cleaning and interpreting the data. We will further engage the audience in a discussion around increasing representation in the global research infrastructure to discover and account for more research outputs.