Newly formed Library department will streamline services for research life cycle

Princeton University Library has formed a new department, the Office of Research Data and Open Scholarship (RDOS), with the goal of streamlining services throughout the entire research cycle. The new department, which merges Princeton Research Data Services and Scholarly Communications, will now engage research across its “life cycle” from ideation to implementation, analysis, and publication.  

“We wanted to find a way to make the availability of these services more efficient for Princeton researchers,” says newly appointed Director of Research Data and Open Scholarship, Wind Cowles. “This new approach offers researchers a clear entry point where all their research needs can be addressed holistically.”

The new department will support Princeton University’s research community with services and infrastructure needed to store, manage, preserve and curate digital research data, and to make it publicly available. Additionally, the office will promote and support services, activities, practices, and frameworks that democratize information, including equitable and sustainable publishing models, licensing, and open access and sharing of research outputs. 

The new department will also collaborate with campus partners to support compliance with external funding or other regulatory requirements related to open access, data management, and data sharing. 

Cowles notes that Princeton Research Data Services and Scholarly Communications will remain separate divisions within the new Office of Research Data and Open Scholarship, although they will now collaborate in new ways to develop projects and services with campus partners to further the mission of advancing innovative open research practices. For example, she says, “We’ve added better support for curating and publishing large data sets in DataSpace by introducing a curation-in-place service in partnership with Research Computing.”

RDOS provides one-to-one consultations and workshops on all aspects of research data management and open scholarship.

Learn more about the Office of Research Data and Open Scholarship.

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Published: March 15, 2021

Written by: Office of Library Communications

Media contact: Barbara Valenza, Director of Library Communications