Initial Evaluation of an Online-Based Collaborative Repository of Research to Enhance Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

Sharing research data is not a new idea; the success of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science Research (ICPSR) data archive provides evidence of data sharing’s utility in the social sciences, while recent articles (Piwowar, Becich, Bilofsky & Crowley, 2008; Piwowar, Day, & Fridsma, 2007) in the biomedical literature have reiterated the importance of data sharing to the advancement of science and knowledge. The American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (APA, 2002)affirms the importance of making research data available – to the extent possible within legal and ethical boundaries – for the purposes of reanalysis by other professionals. The availability of data sets from researchers around the world in online repositories such as ICPSR and PsychData (www.zpid.de) encourages collaborative work across institutions and national boundaries. However, such large scale efforts to share data are not ideal for serving more local aims: the encouragement of intra-and interdisciplinary collaborative research withina single institution. To meet that need, this project focuses on the creation of a searchable database of existing faculty research data sets that can be accessed internally (within Pacific University) for the purposes of developing new uses of data for theses, dissertations and scholarly publications