Traveling on the same road while navigating different terrain: Institutional data services and repositories across the US

The Data Curation Network (DCN) (Johnston et al., 2018) launched the Repository Readiness initiative, a research and advocacy agenda to advance the continued development of institutional data services and IRs as a component of a collaborative global research environment. We will describe the impetus for the Repository Readiness Project, the phases of our work therein, including the Summit for Academic Institutional Readiness in Data Sharing (STAIRS), and lessons learned from the broader US data services landscape. While our efforts were initially scoped to IRs, we found cause to expand the scope to institutionally based data services as a whole. We will emphasize the importance of such data services and IRs in supporting researchers creating FAIR data outputs, including by providing the essential social and knowledge infrastructures to underpin technical solutions. We will articulate the importance of taking a more multi-institutional, rather than siloed, approach to developing data services and IRs in responding to evolving disciplinary and funder expectations. Finally, we will end with recommendations for future directions for institutionally based repositories and data services.