The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is developing a new data platform

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Imagine a data platform that can help improve community resilience to natural disasters, avert potential supply chain disruptions, and accurately predict infectious disease outbreaks.

These are among the goals of a new data platform being developed by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research (ISR), which has received a $38 million investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF) earlier this year.

The new data platform will enable researchers in multiple fields to more efficiently collect, store and secure vital information for their studies. In the past, many researchers have encountered obstacles such as incompatible data standards, missing or inaccurate information, and technical difficulties in managing large data sets.

NSF's $38 million investment enables the Institute for Social Research to establish the Research Data Ecosystem: a national resource for reproducible, robust, and transparent social science research in the 21st century . The ISR will oversee the creation of new data archives and software that researchers can use to access, organize, analyze and contribute to the data.

“The Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) is a five-year project and is expected to be completed by the end of 2026,” explained RDE Chief Executive Officer Jeannette Jackson.

Work on the RDE began on January 17, 2022 and is now in the early stages of construction.

"The first products will be available in 2024," Jackson noted. "The end result will be a flexible data management system with a user-friendly interface that will allow researchers to deposit, search, use the cloud to work with their data and disseminate their data in a safe and secure environment. The ultimate goal is to enable researchers to easily find data and create new knowledge."

An urgent need for better research data

The Research Data Ecosystem Infrastructure Project was initiated because ISR recognized the need to provide better data management and analytical support for researchers engaged in the social sciences peak, Jackson said. The ISR is the largest academic organization for social science inquiry and research in the world. The RDE work is housed at ISR within the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world's largest social science archive specializing in curated data.

“RDE is a transformative infrastructure project that will modernize the ICPSR software platform and develop an integrated suite of software tools to advance research in the social and behavioral sciences with a focus on democratizing data ", according to Margaret "Maggie" Levenstein, director of the ICPSR and principal investigator of the RDE.

According to Levenstein, the RDE will:

Interoperability: An integrated system for the entire research data lifecycle, so that work done early in the data lifecycle is useful at later stages, allowing data from different sources to be integrated . Reproducibility: Facilitate the reproduction and exploitation of previous research results by being able to find and reuse data and code. Transparency: Provide provenance information, including the source, code, and method of collecting research data. Data sharing efficiency: reduce the burden on data producers in sharing data and ensure shared data is FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). Protecting privacy: Protecting privacy...