We are extremely excited to announce the latest progression for our Dataverse community with the forming of a new Global Dataverse Community Consortium.
The vision is that the Global Dataverse Community Consortium (GDCC) will provide international organization to existing community efforts and will provide a collaborative venue for institutions to leverage economies of scale in support of Dataverse repositories around the world. It is our intention that the consortium be community driven and ultimately the goals to be defined by the participants. But recent developments around the need to migrate Digital Object Identifiers and the urgency for several members to join DataCite has accelerated this development and we are happy to say it is going great. While we are eager to begin this important effort, we also recognize that for a global activity of this scale to succeed it will take dedicated planning in year one to make the effort sustainable and to manage expectations.
We are pleased to announce that three long standing community members have agreed to serve on the initial “pilot phase” oversight committee to begin our journey. Mercè Crosas from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Peter Doorn from Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in the Netherlands, and Jonathan Crabtree from Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina have agreed to form the oversight board for the first year until a light-weight governance structure can be decided on by the first-year members. These initial members will be considered Phase One members and will have the opportunity to help build our new consortium. Our initial thought is that we will form teams from these inaugural institutions to tackle our list of goals.
The very first team to be formed will investigate potential governance structures. The oversight committee will be looking for members to join this team as quickly as possible. We imagine many diverse teams to be developed within our consortium seeking to achieve many joint goals. Not all areas can or will be addressed, especially in the first year since our primary year one goal is to shape our sustainable management model and plan for the coming years. Some of the initial ideas that have been suggested as potential services are below.
- Global shared help desk
- Global team for installation support
- Global team for data curation support
- Dataverse Consortium advisory board (this can be a technical advisory board that includes people from outside the Dataverse community; it could also include both a general advisory board and a technical advisory board)
- Organization of Dataverse Community Meetings in multiple places around the world (in addition to the annual Dataverse Community Meeting at Harvard University)
- Best practices for leveraging the power of Dataverse, and implementation of policies on data sharing
- CoreTrust Seal team to investigate trusted repository status
- Privacy and sensitive data concerns
- Strategies for metadata sharing or harvesting across installations
- Collaboration on external tool development and interoperability with Dataverse
All these possibilities are exciting, but we are also happy to announce that the first service to be offered by our new consortium will be a collaborative membership with DataCite that will allow our members who choose that option, to assign DOIs and register them with DataCite. Our application is under review, but all indications are that we will be able to begin DOI migration and registration within the next 30 days.
All Dataverse installations are eligible to be a member of the consortium and we hope to be a diverse international group. To accelerate the ability to join DataCite and to begin our effort the Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina has agreed to manage the financial transactions during the initial phase one year. The following will be the year one membership fee schedule and will be reviewed at the end of the first year.
Basic Global Dataverse Community Consortium Membership Fee: $500 per year.
For members that would like to leverage our consortium’s membership in DataCite, the following additional fees would apply:
DataCite Account Usage Fee: $900 per year (per account needed by each organization*).
DataCite Excess DOIs Fee (for accounts using over 10,000 DOIs): additionally, $300**).
* Some institutions currently assign DOIs using manual methods outside Dataverse or have several accounts. A separate account fee will be required for each method of assignment.
** In the case an account assigns more than 10,000 DOIs per year an excess DOI fee will be charged to help cover the large DataCite increase. For those who are interested in joining the new Global Dataverse Community Consortium please email Jonathan Crabtree at Jonathan_Crabtree@unc.edu to begin the process. We will be drafting a “pilot phase” MOU in the coming days to get things started and hope to have a pre-kick off meeting soon. We are also looking forward to the in person Dataverse Community Meeting this yearhttps://projects.iq.harvard.edu/dcm2018/home . We hope to see everyone there where we will give an update on the progress.