2017 ESIP Summer Meeting

The Sustainable Data Management Cluster draws on the collective experience of those managing data and repositories to promote collaboration and curation strategies that benefit both research networks and individual investigators. A major activity of this group is to develop a framework for calculating Return on Investment (RoI) in data repositories. Recent activities include targeted workshops (with NSF funding) and ESIP meeting sessions. 

Defining RoI in the research data repository setting is challenging, but in normal business terms calculating RoI provides an assessment of the efficiency of an investment by performing a comparison of the amount invested versus the gain resulting from the investment. It is calculated by dividing the measured benefit by the cost of the investment and is normally expressed as a ratio or percentage:
ROI = (Calculated gain from investment - Cost of investment)/Cost of investment

In this session, we will continue the examination of current approaches to evaluating the RoI of research data repositories with an expert in that field, Neil Beagrie (remotely), with data that pertain to our own repositories. Our goals are a white paper outlining proposed approach(es) for assessing the ROI of existing repositories with suggested best practices and defined metrics.