The final report from STAIRS has been published through the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Services and is freely available at: https://doi.org/10.24926/2024.70098

The Data Curation Network hosted the Summit for Academic Institutional Readiness in Data Sharing (STAIRS) on August 5-6, 2024. This event brought together more than 100 representatives from 32 institutions. This summit was funded under the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy’s program, Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCOE). The DMCOE is a project of HHS’s Health FFRDC, which is operated by MITRE.

Applications closed on May 17, 2024. Individuals can review a PDF version of the application, as well as the rubric we used to evaluate applications.

Goals of the STAIRS Summit:

The STAIRS summit was designed to bring together data service providers, institutional repository (IR) managers, data curation professionals and other key stakeholders from across universities who support managing and sharing research data. We used the summit to build up our communities of practice for institutionally based research data services and repositories in academic libraries, identifying common areas of need and exploring ways to strengthen connections between institutions. 

STAIRS Agenda:

At the summit, conversations were focused on four broad discussion topics. We used this topics to attempt to answer the questions:

  • What is the current state of institutionally based data services and repositories?
  • What are current and emerging expectations for data sharing, as identified in documents such as the Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally-Funded Research, and how can we best incorporate them into institutional policies and practices? 
  • What challenges and opportunities are common to institutions and where could institutional data service providers work more closely together as a community to address them?

STAIRS Planning Team

The STAIRS team was composed of:

Jake Carlson, University at Buffalo

Joel Herndon, Duke University

Mikala Narlock, University of Minnesota

Wind Cowles, Princeton University

Wendy Kozlowski, Cornell University

Jon Petters, Virginia Tech

Leslie Delserone, University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Katie Miller, University of Minnesota

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