Message from the Founder

The open-source Dataverse Project supports an extensive collection of research datasets worldwide. Hundreds of people make code contributions to the software each year. There are over 130 Installations of Dataverse in more than 40 countries, each backed by a major institution. Harvard University backs the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Scholars share, download, and reuse datasets from Dataverse installations to learn from and build upon scientific knowledge.

Before the advent of generalist repositories, most published articles in the social sciences contained inaccessible data, allowing anyone to claim almost anything without consequence or evidence. Now, most research data is publicly available through generalist repositories, allowing scholars to review each other’s work, and we’ve seen dramatic progress ever since. Now, many scholarly journals require authors to deposit and make datasets publicly available through generalist repositories, as do many funding institutions, PhD programs, and other organizations. As a result, doing so has become best practice for individual researchers throughout the field.

By making their identities public, dataset authors take responsibility for their submissions. If you question the veracity of a study in a generalist repository—whether the data or the associated scholarly publication—you should either engage directly with the author or publish your work that advances knowledge, ensuring your new data and analyses are also deposited in a repository.

We thank the major institutions hosting Dataverse installations. They are making monumental contributions to the scholarly community, enabling scholars from all over the world to see, evaluate, and build upon the intellectual work of those who came before, so that together we can make greater, better, and faster progress than anyone could alone. The institutionalized scholarly debate and conflict that occur around the Dataverse, particularly in the context of reanalyses of others' data and analyses, is an essential part of what has produced the exponential improvements in humanity’s knowledge of the world.