The Data Curation Network is an active community of professional data curators, data management experts, data repository administrators, disciplinary scientists and scholars. The DCN uses the objectives from our Strategic Framework, as well as our mission, vision, and values, to assess potential partnership opportunities. We invite you to review these prior to contacting us to ensure our partnership will be as mutually beneficial as possible.

Who we are looking for

We look for partners who, like us, are committed to:

  • Broad access to data for reuse as much as ethically possible
  • Maintaining high standards for curation and repositories 
  • Advancing the role of professional data curators, research data librarians, and data repository staff
  • Collaborative endeavors that result in mutual, respective benefit
  • Publishing in open access venues and sharing our own data for transparent scholarship
  • Furthering the mission of non-profit academic institutions and organizations committed to supporting science and sharing research with the public

Potential Partnership Opportunities  

If you are interested in a collaboration that fits into one or more of these categories, please contact us to discuss your ideas further. 

  • Information exchanges – Introductory 1 hour conversations are a great place to start! These informal conversations allow members from both teams to learn more about what each of us do and explore potential partnerships if appropriate. 
  • Collaborative research projects – These are well defined projects with clear research directions. These might be approached via a Special Interest Group or other informal work team with a dedicated lead. 
  • Educational efforts – We’d love to partner on extending our existing training, CURATE(D) workflow, and primers suite to bring data curation best practices to new audiences.
  • Joint response to a RFI – As a group of thoughtful curators and leaders in open science, we are happy to collaborate on requests for information (RFI) or requests for feedback to enhance the impact of our voice. 
  • Conferences/workshops for shared interests or challenges – Our curators have a wealth of knowledge and a diversity of domain expertise– we are happy to participate in workshops that enable us to work to address a shared challenge
  • Grants or other funding opportunities – The DCN is highly active in research projects, and is happy to collaborate; but for grant work to be truly collaborative we need to be brought in during the pre-proposal process whenever possible. 

What we don’t do (currently)

  • We do not provide data repository infrastructure for data sharing. Partner institutions determine how and when data are shared. This means that we do not:
    • Host datasets for access
    • Provide backup or preservation services for data
  • Validate or reproduce results from the code and data in the published research. 

If you have an idea or a question, please reach out to us– we can’t wait to partner with you!

Contact Us