Dataverse Network Project

About the Project

The Dataverse Network is an open source application to publish, share, reference, extract and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows to replicate others work. Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.

A Dataverse Network hosts multiple dataverses. Each dataverse contains studies or collections of studies, and each study contains cataloging information that describes the data plus the actual data files and complementary files.

History of the Project

The Dataverse Network Project is housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Coding of the Dataverse Network software began in 2006 under the leadership of Merce Crosas and Gary King. We benefited considerably from our experience with our earlier Virtual Data Center (VDC) project, which spanned 1999-2006 and was organized by Micah Altman, Gary King, and Sidney Verba as a collaboration between the Harvard-MIT Data Center (now part of IQSS) and the Harvard University Library. Precursors to the VDC date to 1987, comprising such entities as a stand-alone software guide to local data, preweb software, and tools to transfer cataloging information by FTP to other sites across campus automatically at designated times.