Research Infrastructure: Leveraging the Research Data Ecosystem for ICPSR’s Comprehensive Data Archive

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is the worlds largest social science data archive. In 2022, the University of Michigan was funded to build the Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) at ICPSR. RDE is an NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2 award (#1946932) to build a modern software platform and state-of-the-art tools for the research data community to increase safe accessibility to multiple novel data types across the research data lifecycle and to ensure research data are FAIR. When complete, the modernized software platform will showcase a small set of extant ICPSR data that is being used to test the new platform and tools. This RISBS award will provide funding to transition all of ICPSRs vast and diverse data resources (20,000+ studies and over 6 million variables), so that users of these data resources can fully utilize the RDE platform. Without the additional funds requested here, most of the data that ICPSR disseminates will not be able to fully utilize the RDE software platform. To ensure that the RDE software platform provides maximum value to the entire research data community, we are requesting funds to undertake this migration. Migrating the data now will realize significant cost efficiencies. The research software engineers working on RDE have built up deep expertise in both the existing system (that currently provides these data to the research community) as well as in the new RDE platform; they will be able to begin immediately to make the data accessible on the new platform. It will also enable a sustainable future for ICPSR as, until all the data are migrated to the new platform, ICPSR will have to incur the expense of maintaining multiple software systems. When the data are all migrated to the RDE platform, ICPSR will be able to retire the old software systems and no longer incur the cost of maintaining them. For over 60 years NSF and ICPSR member institutions have invested millions of dollars to create the amazing data resource that is the ICPSR data archive. This funding will enable the research community to fully utilize these data with RDEs modern technology and allow ICPSR to follow a sustainable technological path.