So You Want to Share Your Data? Collaborative Policy Writing for the UMass Amherst Data Repository

Policy plays an important role in articulating scope, content, and expectations. This presentation will describe the launching of UMass Amherst’s Data Repository as well as the collaborative approach that the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Data Working Group took in the development of the repository’s policy. Prior to 2017, datasets were primarily added to our IR, ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst, when publishers required researchers to make their supporting data openly available with a DOI by the time an article was submitted for publication. Concurrent with the hiring of a Data Services Librarian and an increasing demand to house and share open datasets from campus researchers, the UMass Amherst Libraries developed and launched an institutional data repository within ScholarWorks. It became immediately clear that we needed to develop a policy for the data repository that would better explain the types of data that we could collect and share openly after we were approached by a researcher who wanted to share data that was not anonymized and who did not understand why sharing this data might be problematic. Creating the policy also enabled the Data Working Group to support our librarians and the Libraries as stewards of our campus’ open data. Ultimately, establishing policy became an important stepping stone for developing internal workflows, and our communication and expectation management to our campus researchers