Research Data Access Costs: Making Research Data Publicly Accessible

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published a new report looking at the costs of research data management and sharing (DMS) from the perspective of both researchers and institutions.

The report, titled “Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expense,” was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The analysis is based on research done at Cornell University, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis.

The authors summarized their findings as:

• $2.5 million: The average combined annual institutional expense for DMS for researchers and campus service providers (Institutional expenses ranged from approximately $800,000 to over $6 million.) 
• $750,000: The average yearly cost for DMS for all institutional units including the library, IT, the research office, and other institutional institutes and centers that have DMS capabilities
• $29,800: The average cost directly incurred by researchers per funded research project for DMS 
• 6 percent: The average percent of overall grant awards that was used by researchers for DMS
• The average DMS expense for researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was $36,000. For those funded by the NSF, the average was $19,000. 

Additionally, the authors found that while large grant projects spend more money in absolute terms on data sharing, smaller grant projects are more burdened by the costs of data sharing and spend a higher percentage of their grant money on data management and sharing. Moreover, the report concluded that researchers who used more institutional services in completing data sharing requirements – for example, using a librarian for help writing a data management and sharing plan – had lower costs overall.

The authors end the report with these recommendations for researchers:

• Seek out and make use of institutional DMS services and infrastructure to decrease overall expenses. 
• Recognize that research data management and sharing has a baseline cost in terms of time and infrastructure. Ensure these costs are sufficiently captured in grant budgets.