"The Policy and Institutional Framework" by James L. Mullins

James L. Mullins. "The Policy and Institutional Framework." In Research Data Management: Practical Strategies for Information Professionals (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014. 436 pages. ISBN 9781557536648): 25-44.

Author James Mullins, Dean of Libraries at Purdue University, has been immersed in the development of data management policy and infrastructure since his arrival at Purdue in 2004. In this chapter, Mullins describes the development of national policy in the area of research data management, and follows that with a case study about Purdue's own move towards managing data.

Mullins begins by describing the realization within the scientific community that research data could and should be shared so that researchers weren't redundantly conducting research to get data that had already been done by another researcher. One of the projects that brought this to light was the Human Genome Project, which generated massive amounts of data. Federal granting agencies were especially interested in preventing the duplication of research, since they were funding many of the studies that were creating redundant data sets.

Studies sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and others identified the many challenges that research organizations faced, and a movement to require data management plans as part of grant-funding requirements began to grow. Recognizing that there was no infrastructure to support data management, the NSF offered a series of grants to encourage organizations to develop and model such infrastructures. Other institutions, such as the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) also support research in this area. One such project resulted in the development of the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit (http://datacurationprofiles.org/). ARL got in on the game by creating the E-Science Institute with seed funding from 70 of its members, and has presented workshops and provided other resources on this issue.

The second half of this chapter was devoted to a description of Purdue University's efforts to create research data management services through collaboration with others across the university.