Knowledge Infrastructures Are Growing Up: The Case for Institutional (Data) Repositories 10 Years After the Holdren Memo

Abstract

Institutional data repositories are uniquely positioned to support researchers in sharing scholarly outputs. As funding agencies develop and institute policies for research data access and sharing, institutional data repositories have emerged as a critical feature in ecosystems for data stewardship and sharing. We show that institutional data repositories can meet and exceed the requirements and recommendations of federal data policy, thereby maximizing the benefits of data sharing. We present results of a mixed-method study which explores the adoption and usage of institutional repositories to share data from 2017 to 2023. Data from two previous studies were combined with data collected in 2023 on the data sharing solutions of Association of Research Libraries member institutions in the United States and Canada. The analysis of the aggregated data indicates that data stewardship has increased in both institutional repositories and institutional data repositories with an increase in complementary infrastructure to support data sharing. We then conduct an “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker & Star, 1999) to ‘surface invisible work’ of making data repositories function well, and demonstrate that institutional data repositories have advantages for providing sustainable stewardship, curation, and sharing of research data. Finally, we show that institutional data repositories may produce additional benefits through established infrastructure, local interoperability, and control.