Preserve Your Data and Scholarship in IU Repositories

Data and scholarship are disappearing from government venues on President Donald Trump's order. The missing information cuts across fields—from scientific articles on disease prevention from the Centers for Disease Control to demographic data from the Census Bureau—but shares the common ground of relating to diversity, climate change, and vaccines, among other topics, as venues from the NY Times to the Wall Street Journal report. Venues such as NPR, Forbes, Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, and the Union of Concerned Scientists all point out that this censorship is harming public health; forestalling scholarship, science, and innovation; perpetuating misinformation; and eroding public trust.  

IU faculty, staff, and students may therefore wish to protect and preserve their data and scholarship by depositing it in IU repositories—IU DataCORE for data, and IUScholarWorks for articles, preprints/postprints, grey literature, syllabi, etc.—in addition to public and disciplinary repositories. IU repositories will perpetually preserve and can make accessible IU’s data and scholarship without the possibility of censorship, and depositing your work in our repositories in addition to public and disciplinary ones creates an additional copy of the materials, which increases their safety. This easy step will prevent your data and scholarship from disappearing and gives you the option to make your data and scholarship publicly accessible. 

For questions about depositing data into IU DataCORE, please consult its user guide and/or contact Ethan Fridmanski, Data Services Librarian, and for questions about depositing scholarship into IUScholarWorks, please consult its user guide and/or contact the Libraries Scholarly Communication Department.