Incentives for Data Producers to Create Archive-Ready Data Sets

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This demonstration project will identify barriers and develop alternative incentive mechanisms for data producers to deposit archive-ready data sets in an archive. Archive-ready means data sets that meet an archive's deposit requirements and submission guidelines. Archives rely heavily on data producers to provide complete and accurate documentation when they deposit data and to comply with other requirements, such as file structures and formats, transfer media, and requirements for protection of privacy and confidentiality. The entire enterprise of digital archiving assumes some degree of cooperation between producers of digital information and archives. When data producers do not comply with submission guidelines, archives incur additional costs in preparing the data for preservation and dissemination, experience delays between ingest and release, and assume risks if data that do not meet quality assurance standards are released. The research literature and years of experience with data deposits at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) indicate that, as a rule, current incentives are insufficient to overcome the obstacles that data producers report. This multi-disciplinary team of experts in digital archiving, social science research, and experimental economics and ICPSR will investigate ways to increase cooperation between producers and archives. With a government partner, the National Institute of Justice, the team will use multiple methods (surveys and experiments) to identify barriers to compliance, revise guidelines andresponsibilities, and develop and test alternative incentive mechanisms.Intellectual MeritThis award will examine legal, social and economic impediments to archiving by analyzing problems that producers encounter when preparing data for deposit and by developing and field testing alternative incentive mechanisms. The project will enhance understanding of curatorial processes and work flow, especially when work is distributed between the data creator and the archive. It will develop metrics for the contributions expected of data producers. Contributions will also be made to our understanding of incentive mechanisms for public goods.Broader ImpactsThe results of research with social scientists will produce better models for sharing responsibility for archiving between data producers and archives. The models and incentive mechanisms will have broad applicability to other types of data producers who are mandated to deposit data by funding agencies or as a condition of publication. Ultimately, more cooperation between data producers and archives will reduce the costs of archiving, accelerate the release of data, and improve its quality. The research will also inform development of standards and guidelines for producer-archive relationships.