Benefits of Depositing and Archiving Data

Archiving data:

• Reinforces open scientific inquiry

• Encourages diversity of analysis and opinions

• Promotes new research and allows for the testing of new or alternative methods

• Improves methods of data collection and measurements through the scrutiny of others

• Reduces costs by avoiding duplicate data collection efforts

• Provides an important resource for training in research

• Ensures the safekeeping of data

• Allows owners to avoid the administrative tasks associated with external users and their queries

• Fulfills grant obligations regarding making funded research available to the research community

• Enables researchers to demonstrate continued use of the data after the original research is completed, which can influence funding agencies to provide further research money

Archiving data with ICPSR affords many additional benefits to principal investigators:

• A description of the investigator's study is included on the ICPSR Web site.

• ICPSR distributes data and documentation to interested users at over 500 academic member institutions, freeing investigators from using their own time and resources to do so and permitting other researchers to conduct secondary analysis using the data.

• ICPSR maintains permanent backups of the data both onsite and offsite.

• ICPSR staff further reviews the data to determine whether any problems of respondent confidentiality exist.

• ICPSR prepares finding aids, including searchable study descriptions and bibliographic citations, to assist in locating the collection within ICPSR's archive.

• Availability of data is publicly announced on the Web site through the Recent Updates & Additions feature.