From June 10-13, the Dataverse Community Meeting will bring data experts from around the world to Carolina to share innovative technical ideas and create new partnerships.
The Dataverse Project is an open-source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. Each year, its annual meeting provides expertise in all aspects of data management and archiving.
This year, the Dataverse Community Meeting (DCM2025) is being hosted by the UNC Research Data Management Core (RDMC), which provides expertise in all aspects of data management and archiving to help researchers navigate new funding agency requirements. This international conference sparks technical advancements, creative integrations, and forward-thinking solutions to transform how Dataverse can extend the value of research data. Register for the meeting here.
UNC Research spoke to RDMC Director Jon Crabtree and Assistant Director of Data Stewardship Thu-Mai Lewis about the upcoming meeting.
Why is it significant for UNC-Chapel Hill to host this meeting?
Crabtree: Carolina is a hub of research and discovery powered by amazing researchers who leverage their skills to collect volumes of data that are critical to new discoveries that enrich and extend the lives of people around the world. The value of these data is almost unquantifiable.
Long after research projects are completed, these data remain a legacy of past success and fuel for the next discovery. UNC-Chapel Hill has embarked on a visionary approach to managing these university assets by leveraging the economies of scale and using these data resources to produce an increased return on investment.
Dataverse and its dynamic community are playing a central role in this process and will enable the university to engage in cutting-edge methods that require well-managed and described data as inputs for future discovery. The Dataverse Community has much to offer our investigators and administrators, and it is exciting to have them on campus.
Lewis: UNC-Chapel Hill was the first adopter of the Dataverse platform outside of Harvard University, where Dataverse originated, and has been a primary influencer of its ongoing design and development.
Dataverse was first introduced to Carolina almost two decades ago by the Odum Institute to provide digital access to 1970s U.S. census files and other valuable archival data collections. Since then, UNC Dataverse has become a hub for data archiving, discovery, and sharing across disciplines. In some ways, bringing the Dataverse Community Meeting to Chapel Hill is a nod to the university’s contributions to the hub and its leadership in research data management and sharing practices.
What is the theme of this year’s Dataverse meeting?
Crabtree: “Expanding the Dataverse: Advancing Innovation, Building Community, Establishing Legacy.”
This theme highlights the achievements of the Dataverse Community in multiple areas: from technical advancements and integrations to innovative faculty-led research initiatives that leverage Dataverse in unique and transformative ways. DCM2025 focuses on the expanding scope of disciplines and domains served by the many installations around the world.
The foundational vision of Dataverse emphasized growth and exploration in open-source data infrastructure, sharing, and management. This year’s meeting reflects a commitment to pushing boundaries in how data is utilized and preserved. We are excited to learn how Dataverse and its growing community support the research legacies of their institutions and faculty while simultaneously cultivating stronger communities of practice in data sharing, preservation, and repository infrastructure.
Who would benefit from attending?
Crabtree: This conference is geared toward anyone dealing with data management issues. Sessions will cover a broad array of topics from managing geospatial and image data to creating metadata and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). Anyone from research administrators to principal investigators to information technologists will find the sessions engaging and can discover tools to make project data more manageable and shareable.
Lewis: Data management and sharing is a community endeavor. It requires effort from researchers who are producing, cleaning, analyzing, and sharing data; institutions that provide data infrastructure and resources; project managers who support data quality and disposition; software developers who design and deploy data technologies; librarians and archivists who provide stewardship and access to datasets; and others who support research data access, generation, analysis, processing, management, and sharing.
Each one of these stakeholders would benefit from attending the Dataverse Community Meeting because data impact every phase of the research lifecycle.
Why is the Dataverse and its mission more important than ever?
Crabtree: The research community is facing a revolutionary change with the emergence of AI and use of large language models to power research. Critical to this effort are the data that fuel these new methodological approaches. These data must be well-described and managed to achieve quality results from these new approaches. Dataverse and its community are dedicated to providing quality data to leverage in this new age of approaches. Data archivists and curators are needed to engage in the research process, and tools like Dataverse are critical at this point in history.
Lewis: Now more than ever, we recognize data as assets that fuel scientific innovation. The current geopolitical environment has brought into focus the importance of data to the scientific enterprise, particularly in light of recent challenges accessing government datasets that for years we believed would always be available.
The primary mission is long-term preservation and access. UNC Dataverse helps ensure that science does not have to end when project funding ends and has a robust preservation plan in place to ensure that the data can be discovered and used now and in the future.