"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
"Dataverse is powerful, flexible, and well-used. It already contains more than 55,000 data sets. But it could have many more if more researchers knew how to take advantage of its power. ODAP will help Dataverse reach out to users, help Harvard researchers find an open home for their data, and help researchers working on the same topics find data sets open for use and reuse."
Peter Suber
Director of Scholarly Communication
Harvard University
"The Harvard Dataverse is essential for the distribution and archiving of the research projects that I run. The Dataverse has allowed my team to produce and distribute the only publicly available database of US election returns at the precinct level. And the Dataverse is the hub for the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a project that involves research teams at more than 70 different universities throughout the United States. Without the Dataverse it would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to assemble, distribute, and archive these important data resources.
Dataverse is great. It's easy to put studies into the archive and to download data. It's free to the public, which means my research activities have the widest possible distribution and impact. The election archive and the cooperative congressional election survey have each had tens of thousands of downloads in just a few years."
Stephen Ansolabehere
Professor of Government
Harvard University
"Keeping track of digital data has become a critical problem for scientists, thanks to the growing size and diversity of data sets. The Dataverse offers a robust way to store, share, and cite data, because the system is flexible enough to satisfy impatient scientists depositing data, while still providing rich metadata options that allow for sophisticated searching."
Alyssa Goodman
Professor of Astronomy
Harvard University
"Increasingly, funders are requiring the inclusion of data management plans in grant proposals. While each funder and discipline may have varying requirements, Dataverse can serve as a valuable tool to meet the requirement for long term data preservation and access. Many Harvard researchers have already taken advantage of Harvard's Dataverse as their data management plan solution."
Susan O'Connor Gomes
Director of Research Development and Strategy
Harvard University
"In the field of global health resources are seldom abundant, and sharing hard earned data between individuals, groups or institutions has never been more pressing to advance the field. Our work focuses on developing diagnostics and surveillance methologies for drug resistant tuberculosis. Our collaboration with the Dataverse team allows us to share our data with the community while preserving the data's link to our group through the permanent DOI. We believe that this model will encourage other researchers to share their data, and accelerate the pace of research in this field."
Maha Farhat
Researcher
Harvard School of Public Health
"I have used the Harvard Dataverse Network for two projects -- one a set of studies on new drug approval times by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the other a study of anti-slavery petitioning and its history. The datasets associated with these studies have been downloaded dozens of times. In addition, the Harvard Dataverse will be the home for the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, to be released in February 2015. The Harvard Dataverse has allowed me to communicate my findings and my data to scholars across the social sciences, including economics, history, political science and sociology. It is one of the most valuable tools I use in my research."
Daniel Carpernter
Professor of Government
Harvard University
"I think for me, the best thing about Dataverse is that it allows me to post data and replication code and holds it securely. Even though I might switch institutions, affiliations, email accounts, or computers (or, now, Dropbox accounts), I know that my replication code will be constant and maintained. That's definitely a good thing."
Maya Sen
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Harvard Kennedy School