Funds from this grant provide three years of support for the expansion of a fellowship program hosted by the Research Data Alliance (RDA), an international community organization of researchers and innovators who have come together to build the social and technical infrastructure need to enable the open sharing of data. These fellowships offer summer funding and travel support to graduate students and postdocs with data science skills or training who will assist RDA’s various working groups on one or more specific projects.  To ensure that projects are aligned with each fellow’s primary work, the application process requires nomination by a candidate’s advisor or supervisor.  Sloan Foundation funds will support 30 fellows over the next three years.

In 2013, the Foundation approved a one?year grant to rOpenSci, a collective of data scientists, to build and promote a suite of “packages” for R, a powerful programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.  The packages aimed to greatly simplify the process of gathering data from various archives and services commonly used by researchers.  Such software modules dramatically lower the barriers to R use, freeing researchers from having to write their own idiosyncratic code when parsing data from commonly used repositories like Dryad, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This grant provides continued support for this project.  The project team will continue software development, shifting their focus to several generic needs like spatial data analysis and the submission of data to repositories for publication, as well as supporting R interoperability with popular emerging tools for data management like Dat.  To further lower barriers to R use in data-driven research, rOpenSci will also develop openly licensed curricular “modules” that could be incorporated into graduate seminars or informal workshops.  In speed adoption, rOpenSci will cultivate an initial cohort of a dozen “ambassadors” from across the natural and social sciences who will develop domain-specific R packages and lead various outreach and community-building efforts in their home disciplines.

Funds from this grant support efforts by an international team of researchers including Kristin Eschenfelder and Greg Downey of the University of Wisconsin, Madison School of Library and Information Studies and Kalpana Shankar at the University College Dublin School of Information and Library Studies to develop a set of case studies of social science data archives. Beginning with a pilot case study already underway of the University of Michigan’s Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, the team will select a cohort of up to five data archives for study that meet specific criteria, including longevity, collections that are contributed by others, and funding models that do not rely on direct government support.  The researchers will draw on interviews and archival research to develop detailed histories of these archives with a particular focus on how they evolved their current access policies and business models.  The ensuing case studies will help provide a more robust foundation for discussions about how data archives might be made sustainable over the long term.