The Social Science Data Archive, DANS, Netherlands, has published quality guidelines for data archiving and "making data future-proof." An innovation is that the 17 guidelines apply in turn to data archives, but also data producers and data users.

The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything ...

DRIVER, or the Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research, is a joint collaboration between ten European partners which aims to create a knowledge base for European research. DRIVER is funded by the EU (FP6) and puts in place a test-bed of digital repositories across
Europe, to assist with the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area. The project builds upon existing institutional repositories and national networks, from countries including the Netherlands,
Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.

This is an extensive report in PDF format. Note pages 138 -151 provide an informative overview of data curation tools, procedures, and data quality in an IR environment

The ICPSR Official Representative (OR) meeting powerpoints from 18-20 October, 2007 are now available.Topics include:
- Managing Geographic Data: Formats, Versions, and Legal Issues
- Symposium: "The Present and Future of Federal Funding for Social Science Research"
- Thinking Big: Promoting Relationships That Promote Data
- Institutional Repositories and Data Archives: The Facts, the Fit, the Future
- Tinkering with Teaching: ICPSR Initiatives to Connect Data and Classroom
- Privacy in the Information Age
- The Politics of Political Polling - Social Science Computing and Technology on Campus
- New activities/projects at ICPSR
- Health Data: Comparative Issues
- New Frontiers in Information Retrieval and Resource Discovery
- International Data Issues: An International Perspective on Archiving and Data Sharing

ICPSR is the Inter-university consortium for political and social research,
an institutional membership-based social science data archive based at the University of Michigan.

"Data sharing is catching on with sites like Swivel and ManyEyes making it possible to display, remix, and compare a wide range of data. As the practise of sharing biodata in online banks becomes more common, what are the implications for intellectual property and patient confidentiality?" (links to a 3 page article from First Author)

An ICPSR announcement about a new project to "investigate the extent of research data sharing in the social sciences and assess whether research data sharing is related to other aspects of the scientific process including scientific publication."

The Data Science Journal is a peer-reviewed electronic journal publishing papers on the management of data and databases in Science and Technology. This special issue addresses 'Open Data for Global Science'

Presentations and a summary written by John MacColl from this event in December 2006 held by RIN which considered roles and responsibilities of funders and others for data preservation and access.

The EDINA GRADE project deliverables, including a report on Geospatial data sharing behaviour in UKHE, Charlotte Waelde's groundbreaking report on licensing of geospatial databases (this challenged the Ordnance Survey view that their data is covered by copyright rather than simply the EU Database Directive), Pauline Simpson's survey or 'baseline audit' of geospatial data in IRs, and a compendium of derived geospatial data in UKHE.