Data reuse is a major focus for institutional research groups and their funders and it’s easy to see why. After the (often) expensive process of collecting, analyzing, and mining research data for valuable new knowledge, any additional attention, such as the publication, reference, or reuse of that data, multiplies its value.
But understanding researchers’ behaviors and needs when it comes to data sharing and reuse is challenging. Each discipline has unique norms and practices for how they collect and manage data, when (and if) they share their data, and how they determine a dataset’s fitness for reuse. Data curators—as information science practitioners—make a wealth of decisions and take well-informed actions to ensure that selected data have meaningful and enduring value to future research.
