Commercial search engine developers and universities: a critical time for collaboration in the coming age of publicly accessible research data

Abstract

Driven by new data sharing requirements from funding agencies, most recently and notably the National Science Foundation, academic researchers are on the verge of making rapidly increasing amounts and varieties of research data available for replication of findings and re-use. Universities are now building or enhancing repositories to help researchers make their data available, and are employing and helping develop domain-specific metadata standards, such as the DDI, to aid in the discoverability and manageability of these datasets. However, with the growing amount of data and number of repositories, the risk of "data silos" increases as well. Providers of commercial search engines must join the current efforts of global, web-scale data discovery - otherwise, the usefulness of the search engines AND the research data generated with public funding are both at risk.