Monday, Feb. 10, marks the start of International Love Data Week 2025!
Love Data Week (Feb. 10–14) is a celebration of data, including data science and data management, held around Valentine’s Day every year. This year’s theme “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?” asks us to examine who owns data and who uses it. So how can the University of Iowa Libraries’ Research Data Services help you year-round?
Get credit for your work
When you share your data through a repository, like our institutional repository Iowa Research Online (IRO), you establish yourself as the creator of the dataset with a preserved record of your work. Repositories preserve and provide access to the data, and provide persistent, unique identifiers (like DOIs) and other information so others can find, understand, and use your data in their own research. Protecting the integrity of the data and enabling others to find and accurately cite your work can broaden your research impact and accelerate research progress. Many funders and publishers encourage or require data sharing.
Data curation adds value
Research Data Services collaborate with researchers to curate their data for sharing in IRO. Data curation encompasses several activities, such as reviewing data files and formats, adding and refining documentation/metadata (e.g., readme files, abstracts, keywords), linking the data to funding sources and publications, and checking for typos and minor errors. These practices go hand in hand with supporting reproducibility and FAIR principles.
A 2023 survey examining data curation across six academic institutions found that 90% of researchers who used curation services had increased confidence in data sharing after the curation process, 97% believe it enhances data sharing, and 96% agreed that data curation is worth the effort (Marsolek et al., 2023).
To learn more about how Research Data Services can provide valuable assistance, please visit our website or contact us.