The Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS) is a voluntary partnership of organizations created to archive, catalog and preserve data used for social science research. Examples of social science data include: opinion polls; voting records; surveys on family growth and income; social network data; government statistics and indices; and GIS data measuring human activity.

Our Data-PASS partners include The Odum Institute , ICPSR, NARA, Roper, and UCLA.

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TheDataWeb is a joint public development effort being created by the U.S. Census and now directed by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Australian Bureau of Statistics for data networking and policy oriented data presentation. Official data from multiple agencies in both Australia and the United States are disseminated through a network of hosts distributed across agencies in both countries. Thousands of datasets are available, the vast majority of which are freely accessible to the public. These comprise over 6 TB of heterogeneous integrated data in many formats, including hierarchical micro-data, linked tables, aggregated data, longitudinal data, and linked time series formats. The effort focuses on “official” data, but also permits publicly accessible data to be made available. It works with statistical agencies to build a data framework that can access and present “official” data in ways that meet official statistical usage requirements. This focus includes advanced tabulation, integration of analysis across many data sources simultaneously, integrated GIS manipulation and analysis, and a plethora of geographies and official code sets.

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MIND Informatics develops social and semantic web applications and ontologies for biomedical research, focusing on scientific communications and data in neuroscience and stem cell research.

Among many projects since 2004, MIND Informatics developed the Pain Research Forum, PD Online, and StemBook; the SWAN and AO ontologies; the SWAN Alzheimer Knowledge Base; and the Stem Cell Commons repository for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

MIND Informatics is collaborating with Dataverse, the ISA-Tab project at the University of Oxford and PLoS Computational Biology to develop domain specific metadata for biomedical experiments in Dataverse.

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Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data: This project is a broad, multidisciplinary effort to help enable the collection, analysis, and sharing of personal data for research in social science and other fields while providing privacy for individual subjects. It is a Harvard-based, collaborative effort between the Center for Research on Computation and Society, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the Data Privacy Lab. It received seed funding from Google Inc., and will now be supported primarily as a Frontier project in the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program.

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Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is working with the Dataverse Network on a two-year project to make data sharing and preservation an intrinsic part of the publication process. Funded by a $1 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the plan is to integrate the Open Journal Systems (OJS) with the Dataverse Network software. According to the project proposal, “The result will be to increase the replicability and reusability of published work in social science by improving the infrastructure for, practice of, and incentives related to data publication and citation.” Visit this project's website for more in-depth information.

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PSI believes that effective social marketing must be grounded in research. For this reason, PSI’s programs typically include formative research and a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) component, which rely on state-of–the-art research methodologies developed by PSI and others to measure and improve program effectiveness. Three of PSI's primary methodologies include TRaC (multi-round population-based survey), MAP (coverage and quality of coverage of PSI's health products in retail outlets), and FoQus (qualitative research to develop improve programs and marketing messages).

PSI projects use epidemiological, behavioral, and market research to develop programs and interventions, and to monitor and evaluate their results. Technical specialists and researchers jointly develop study designs, emphasizing low-cost, rapid methods. Data are collected either in-house or through local research firms. The findings are summarized in reports written to permit timely decision making by programmers and shared with donors and other stakeholders. Regional Researchers are based in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to provide technical assistance to country teams throughout the M&E process.

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The Seamless Astronomy Group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics brings together astronomers, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians and visualization experts involved in the development of tools and systems to study and enable the next generation of online astronomical research. It focus on connecting data with literature. This group is the main contributor to the Astronomy Dataverse.

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The SafeArchive system is an open-source system for TRAC auditing and policy-based automatic management of LOCKSS replication networks. With SafeArchive you can: Analyze any LOCKSS network; check that collections are replicated, valid, and up-to-date; create formal replication policies; audit the network for current and historical TRAC compliance; replicate content archived in the Dataverse Network easily.

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The Dataverse Network works with The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (CPI) to build time series data visualizations.

Leadership:

Development Team:

Data Acquisition, Preservation and Archiving Team: