The New Era of Data and Implications for Universities:  Compliance, Scholarship, Stewardship, and Access

The research enterprise has entered a new era having a new king: Data. Twenty years ago, the grand research data challenge involved collecting and analyzing big data, i.e., massive data sets from numerical simulations or instruments such as telescopes and cyclotrons. That challenge remains but has been augmented by a new landscape at the opposite end of the spectrum, in which massive numbers of ubiquitous devices – including humans – provide relatively small amounts of highly perishable streaming data that can be collected and analyzed in a nearly unlimited number of ways. Add to that a sea change in the publication of scholarly works, and requirements for managing and provisioning the data associated with them, and one sees that the research community is faced with the need to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape in which the players, roles and end game are anything but clear. This panel will examine both the challenges and opportunities of this new era of data and implications for research.

Taming the Data Shrew: The National Science Board’s Recommendations on Scientific Data Management

The increasing ease of gathering large amounts of varied data—including digital data, research specimens, artifacts, etc. - and funding of large-scale collaborative projects, have caused the broad policy issues surrounding the management of scientific and engineering research data to become critically important. The National Science Board appointed a Data Policy Task Force, chaired by Dr. Griffiths, to explore these various issues and develop a set of recommendations as to how collected data are shared and managed to ensure broad, timely, and long-term availability and accessibility to the entire research community. Dr. Griffiths will present the results of the Task Force’s work and the National Science Board’s recommendations on scientific data management based on the Task Force’s input.  She will also address the foundation these recommendations create for any discussion of the impacts, challenges, potentials and possible next steps to promote effective data management across disciplinary and organizational boundaries, especially as it relates to NSF-funded grants and projects.