The Data Datingverse - How Dataverse Can Bring Researchers Together

Senior researchers within specific communities have built and maintained relationships to facilitate collaboration and data sharing. Early career researchers, however, are still building their networks, making it difficult to identify potential collaborators and/or data sources. The Love Consortium, comprised of researchers studying social connections and relationships, strives to remove barriers to data sharing and collaboration within their community using Dataverse as a data networking platform. With this goal in mind, The Love Consortium received funding from the John Templeton Foundation and recently partnered with The Odum Institute to create a data repository that would meet the needs of a network of researchers dedicated to the collaborative use of data about social connections. We like to think of The Love Consortium Dataverse (TLC Dataverse) as a “datingverse” where interested researchers can learn about available data through robust metadata records. Since most of these data contain personally identifiable and protected health information, they cannot be shared due to data restrictions and security concerns. Instead, the datingverse provides curated metadata records about the data, supplementary materials, and related publications as well as guidance on how individuals may collaborate with data producers and submit data access requests. The Odum Institute developed a customized metadata block, templates, submission workflows, and a quality assurance checklist to help the TLC Dataverse admins streamline the submission process and grow their collection. This poster will highlight how Dataverse, an online data repository platform, can be adapted to meet the needs of a unique community by enabling data visibility and collaborations among researchers in search of good data and collaborators with similar interests