DataSpace: A Funding and Operational Model for Long-Term Preservation and Sharing of Research Data

At the May 5 meeting of the National Research Board, the NSF announced that, as of October 2010, it will require that all grant proposals include a data management plan. This announcement represents the next step in what has been a growing trend on the part of government agencies to require researchers to plan for the preservation and sharing of the data produced by publicly funded research. How can universities help their researchers meet these emerging requirements? Princeton has developed a business and organizational model, named DataSpace, which is designed to meet these requirements in a cost- and staff-sustainable way.