Incentives for Data Producers to Create Archive-Ready Data Sets

(Support by the National Science Foundation, Award # IIS 046022)

School of Information

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social

Research (ICPSR)

Introduction

The entire enterprise of digital archiving assumes some degree of cooperation between producers

of digital information and the archives that acquire, preserve, and disseminate that information.

Data archives expect producers to submit digital content and associated information that allows

the archive to prepare data for long-term preservation and for dissemination and reuse by others.

Data archives issue general guidelines and requirements for submissions and offer other services, such as training, to improve the

comprehensiveness and quality of the data, documentation, and metadata that producers supply.

When data producers do not comply with submission guidelines, the archive incurs additional

costs in preparing the data for preservation and dissemination, experiences delays between ingest

and release, and assumes risks if it releases data that do not meet quality assurance standards.

We know from our experience at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social

Research (ICPSR) and elsewhere that full compliance with submission requirements is the

exception rather than the rule.

This project will use survey methods to investigate the obstacles to preparing data

for deposit and laboratory and field experiments to develop and test alternative incentive

mechanisms to elicit the cooperation from data producers.

Work team

Principle Investigators:

Margaret Hedstrom (School of Information),

Yan Chen (School of Information),

Myron P Gutmann (ICPSR)

Other team members:

Mary Vardigan (ICPSR)

Kaye Marz (ICPSR)

Jinfang Niu (School of Information)

Project Proposal

 Part 1

 Part 2