Center for Knowledge Infrastructures

As open access to research data becomes a requirement of funding agencies and journals, digital data archives are the preferred mechanisms for data sharing and reuse. While institutional policies support data sharing, surprisingly little is known about the uses and users of digital data archives, and about the relationships between users and the staff of data archives. Digital data archives, however, vary widely in organizational structure, mission, collection, funding, and relationships to their users and other stakeholders. We present a case study of DANS, the Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands, with the goal of analyzing the uses, users, policy, and practice of digital data archiving based on highly-distributed data collection, and the implications for data sharing and reuse.