ICPSR at MIT
The Libraries are members of ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The ICPSR hosts a large archive of both quantitative and qualitative data in the social and behavioral sciences. ICPSR also provides support for depositing and curating data, outlined below, as well as educational and teaching resources.
Services provided
As ICSPR members, MIT affiliates have access to download curated data from the ICPSR data archive. MIT affiliates also have access to deposit data at no cost. ICPSR offers ways to deposit data that is publicly available as well as data that is restricted access.
ICPSR provides several repositories to deposit research data:
- The general archive, which includes both public access and restricted use data. ICPSR provides curation services for data deposited in this archive; these services include disclosure risk review, creating a metadata record, and quality review. Curation services are available to members of ICPSR (including MIT affiliates) at no cost and the curated data is made available to the other 800 member institutions of ICSPR. To make curated data available to the public as well, researchers can choose to pay for curation directly.
- OpenICPSR, which does not include curation and offers fully public access to data. This is a good option for providing replication datasets for publications.
- In addition to these repositories, ICPSR hosts a variety of specialty repositories for various specific projects.
- ICPSR also provides a restricted-use data enclave (both virtual and physical) for sensitive data that cannot be shared publicly. Access to restricted data is only granted following an application process during which researchers agree to follow strict legal and electronic requirements for maintaining data confidentiality.
How to access and deposit data.
- To create an account to access or deposit data, go to https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ and click the blue “Log In” button in the upper right hand corner.
- You can sign in by clicking “sign in by email” and then creating a new account, using your MIT email address. You can also sign in via your ORCID account. Note that the ‘access through your institution’ option is not currently working.
- To find data from other studies, go to the “find data” tab to explore or search.
- To deposit data, go to “share data” and then “start deposit”. Note you do not need to have deposited data approved ahead of time, as long as it fits within the social and behavioral sciences and the collection development policy of ICPSR. You will be given a web form to fill out, which will then lead you to the data deposit interface to create your project and upload files to ICPSR.
- To choose uncurated direct deposit with immediate availability, choose the OpenICPSR option. To take advantage of ICPSR’s curation services, choose deposit to ICPSR. For restricted data deposit, use the “Additional Information” box on the form to request one or more of ICPSR’s restricted-use data dissemination options described here.
- When depositing, you will need to provide metadata about your data, including a project summary, information on principal investigators, and optional information on scope and methodology of the data. The dataset size limit is 200GBs, with 1000 individual files/folders, but if you need additional storage contact ICPSR ahead of time to see if your project can be accomodated. Also reach out to ICPSR staff at deposit@icpsr.umich.edu before deposit if your data is in a multimedia format such as images, video or sound.
Data Management Plans & ICPSR
You may want to include ICPSR in your data management plan if you plan to store your data there; for NIH-funded projects, ICPSR offers a sample data management plan here. You can also refer to ICPSR’s guide to best practices for social science data for help with data management plans and for best practices as you collect and prepare your data.
Contact Data Management Services or ICPSR staff at deposit@icpsr.umich.edu for advice or help with using this repository.