What happens when someone shares data with ICPSR? How do I know I can trust ICPSR to preserve my data?

Once you’ve chosen to share your data through ICPSR, you have two options: Self-publish your data and documentation or have ICPSR professionally curate your data.

If you choose ICPSR curation, your data will undergo the following:

  • A review to identify respondent confidentiality risks, such as direct or indirect identifiers, and a recommendation about whether the data should be publicly available or restricted-use.
  • The creation of a complete metadata record that documents your study’s purpose, methods, sample, and other key details. This will make your data discoverable through ICPSR’s search tools and usable by others not on your research team.
  • A comparison of the data with the documentation to ensure codes are correct, variables are properly formatted, missing values are defined, and labels are clear.
  • The creation of files formatted for the major statistical packages (R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata) and a delimited file as well as an archival file (ASCII) and online analysis tools (if desired) and production of a standardized codebook.
  • Identification of published and unpublished works based on your data and publication links added to the study.
  • Release into ICPSR’s catalog and archival storage.

If you self-publish, your study/project will be published nearly instantaneously, including all associated files, without the curation steps outlined above.

All studies/projects will be assigned a persistent identifier (DOI) and data citation for proper attribution after publication.

Note: You retain the ownership rights to your data; ICPSR shares on your behalf.

As one of the oldest and largest social science data archives in the world, ICPSR has been trusted by the research community to preserve and support access to data since 1962. ICPSR holds several trusted repository certifications, including the most recent CoreTrustSeal certification. ICPSR was also a 2019 winner for the National Medal for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Being a trusted repository means that our mission is to provide reliable, long-term preservation of and access to managed digital resources to the community, now and in the future. It means we’re committed to providing a transparent view of our curatorial and technological processes and continuously improving those processes to meet best practices in data access and preservation.

Learn more about what happens to deposits from start to finish. (pdf)

Visit the Policies page for more details about ICPSR’s repository operations and certifications.