Many Harvard researchers are subject to open-data policies from the journals publishing their articles or the agencies funding their research. Many others simply want to open up their data to realize the benefits of transparency, collaboration, data citation, research acceleration, and reproducibility. ODAP is a program to help them.

ODAP will offer advice and instruction on how to deposit data files in the Harvard Dataverse​. When privacy is an issue, ODAP will offer advice on how to make data files as open as privacy constraints will allow. Since anyone in the world may deposit in Dataverse, ODAP’s online assistance should help researchers everywhere. However, when online assistance isn’t enough, ODAP staffers and volunteers will offer personal assistance to Harvard faculty, students, fellows, and postdocs. We encourage other institutions to offer personal assistance to their own researchers as well, and can work with them on how to do that.

If you’re interested in providing open access to your data, you should also be interested in providing open access to the research articles reporting your analysis and conclusions. If you’re at Harvard, we welcome your research publications, especially your scholarly articles, in our open-access repository, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH). For more details, see the Office for Scholarly Communication. However, the present web site is about opening access to data files, not opening access to texts.

What the Harvard Community is Saying

"Data is one of the most vital resources of the 21st century.  Fortunately, with Harvard's Dataverse, data associated with research can be stored and made accessible freely so others around the world can replicate studies and reuse it for new purposes. The Harvard Library will link publications in DASH, Harvard’s institutional repository, to data in Dataverse, enriching the pool of open access information."

Sarah Thomas
Vice President for the Harvard Library
Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

See all >>