Developing a research data management services infrastructure at Carnegie Mellon University

Over the past few years, federal funding agencies have been suggesting in a variety of venues that the time for more strict data management and data sharing mandates was coming soon. Indeed, in early 2011 the National Science Foundation released its requirements for data management planning. Other agencies and programs have followed suit over the past year, culminating in last month’s announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that all Federal Agencies with significant research and development programs would be on the hook for mandating and facilitating data curation by their grantholders. Following the 2011 NSF mandate, many academic libraries and research management entities at universities across the U.S. have turned an eye towards offering research data management services to academic researchers. These services have taken many forms depending on available resources, extant infrastructure, institutional commitment, and needs of local researchers, among other consideration. Starting in early 2012, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) University Libraries initiated an investigation into providing research data services to the university research community. Over the past year, the University Libraries, along with other collaborators at the university, have developed a plan for implementing a suite of data management services and have begun to roll out the first tier of these services. In this document we describe the process by which we developed our approach to data management services at CMU and the direction we expect to move in coming months and years.