Council endorses new ICPSR Strategic Plan
The ICPSR Council has given its endorsement to ICPSR’s new Strategic Plan, which details an organizational paradigm shift to support research data through 2021 and beyond. The ICPSR Council is the governing board that represents ICPSR’s 778 member institutions.
“This Strategic Plan highlights all of the great things about ICPSR: its data stability, security, innovation, and access,” said Council President Michael Jones-Correa, President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Council member Jane Fry, Data Services Librarian at Carleton University (Ottawa, ON) and Carleton’s longtime Official Representative to ICPSR, said the new plan will help articulate ICPSR’s mission to everyone connected to the organization. “If you don’t have anything to check back against, how do you really know how you’re doing?” she said.
The plan highlights and supports four key strengths:
Innovation: ICPSR is in the midst of an organizational paradigm shift to connect and integrate its archival, stewardship, and educational activities. ICPSR will draw on its unique status as a membership consortium to bring the highest value data and educational services to its members and to the broader research and evidence-building communities.
Security: ICPSR’s transformation will allow it to support increases in the quantity and variety of research data, as well as changes in how researchers seek and use information. ICPSR will support access to and interoperability of non-designed, organic data such as social media, administrative, imaging, health, and commercial data. ICPSR will embrace data stewardship standards that support ethical, privacy-protecting, and reproducible research and interoperable data resources.
Preservation: ICPSR’s administrative structures will promote greater resource efficiency, consistent implementation of best practices, and prudent investment in strategically-identified priorities, including continuous technological improvement. ICPSR will strengthen its capacity to ingest, curate, preserve, and disseminate more data, and more types of data, at lower cost and greater user accessibility.
Access: ICPSR will leverage its experience over the last half-century in training thousands of students in quantitative methods to build new, innovative tools for researchers, teachers, and students so that they can understand and participate in the twenty-first century data revolution.
“ICPSR’s strategic plan articulates our vision for a data-driven future and ICPSR’s role in stewarding data to enable transformative and reproducible scientific research and evidence-building. ICPSR’s Council, its member institutions, and every one of its employees worked to make this strategic plan a concrete guide to realizing that vision,” said Margaret Levenstein, ICPSR’s director.
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Jun 18, 2018