Cross-Cutting Improvements: Empowering Vermont Open Data

About This Grant

Open and accessible research data is essential for scientific progress, informed policy, and public benefit. Yet many researchers and communities, especially in rural states, lack the infrastructure, skills, and support needed to share and reuse data effectively. This project, led by the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) at the University of Vermont (UVM), addresses these gaps by strengthening open-data infrastructure and cultivating a regional culture of open science. It expands UVM’s institutional data repositories, so research outputs become more findable, accessible, and reusable (FAIR) for scholars, state agencies, nonprofits, and the public. The project also continues the annual Vermont Open Data Summit, bringing together researchers, government, industry, and civic organizations to build skills and collaborate around open data. Through partnerships with state agencies, regional planning bodies, and the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, the initiative links university capabilities to real community needs. The Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) at the University of Vermont proposes a three-year effort to build sustainable, multidisciplinary FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data management practices and open science capacity across Vermont. The project will expand UVM’s open data infrastructure by increasing Dataverse storage beyond its current one-terabyte limit, establishing standard operating procedures for data ingestion and curation, and providing researcher outreach, onboarding, and individualized data management consultations. The enhanced repository will support Digital Object Identifier assignment, metadata standards, and interoperability with external systems. VERSO will launch the annual Vermont Open Data Summit, a two-day regional event that strengthens open-data literacy and collaboration among academic institutions, government, nonprofits, and industry. The summit will feature keynotes, workshops including an adapted NASA Open Science 101 curriculum that the team has published, and a participant-driven unconference, with proceedings openly published via GitHub and Jupyter Books. VERSO will continue supporting community-driven open data projects through the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), which engages interdisciplinary student teams in Agile-managed open data and open-source software projects with public-sector and community partners. Project outcomes will be tracked using repository metrics and summit metrics. Together, these efforts provide a replicable model for advancing FAIR data practices at rural land-grant institutions nationwide. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.