ICPSR 2019 - 2020 Annual Report

From ICPSR Director Margaret Levenstein

On March 13, 2020, ICPSR transitioned to fully remote operations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our staff immediately moved to make sure that we could all continue our work, and they made sure that our members, most of whom were also making the same transition to working — and teaching — from home, had access to ICPSR resources. The staff and instructors in the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research quickly pivoted to offer our first-ever fully virtual Summer Program. While we missed seeing our instructors and participants at Summer Picnics and all the other outside-the-classroom events, the Summer Program maintained the same curricular offerings online, and served more students than ever before.

While working from home, we persevered, continuing to serve our members and our mission. We continued to expand our data offerings, building on new collaborations and strengthening old ones. We also persevered in the ongoing work of modernizing our platform to improve the experience of our data users and our data depositors. We set our intention to care for one another as well, as people juggled radically changed familial responsibilities, isolation and fear, and serious health challenges.

At the end of May, ICPSR watched in horror, along with the rest of the world, the video of the brutal murder of George Floyd. At its June 10 meeting, the ICPSR Council observed 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence in Mr. Floyd’s memory. ICPSR has long been committed to making its data and its training activities useful to the community in a way that embraces diversity and encourages inclusion — from its Resource Center for Minority Data to its Summer Program Diversity Fellows. ICPSR is committed to fighting individual and institutional racism. To us, this means a commitment to making our staff and our consortium inclusive, so that our organization lives the values that it promotes, and that in its leadership in the research data community, it promotes equity, access, and inclusiveness.

ICPSR launched an important collaboration with the federal statistical system to support access to data for evidence-building. ResearchDataGov responds to the requirements of the Evidence-Based Policy Act of 2018 by providing a single portal for anyone looking to access confidential data from Federal Statistical Research Data Centers.

Our collaboration with American Economic Association supports its implementation of a policy requiring pre-publication sharing and replication of all analytic results. As of this writing, AEA has added 3,409 studies to openICPSR and improved the discoverability and the preservation of critical resources that inform modern economic analyses.

The collaborations mentioned above are just two examples of many that we know will improve the transparency and reproducibility of social science research. We are honored to help lead efforts to build knowledge of the social world, while also building trust and accountability around facts and evidence.

From ICPSR Council Chair Lisa D. Cook

Before the pandemic started, we were preparing for March 2020 to be a historic time at ICPSR. The Council was set to meet March 12-13. StoryCorps was on-site to record some of ICPSR’s oral history, as part of ICPSR’s award package after receiving the National Medal for Museum & Library Service in 2019. Then, suddenly, states quickly made moves to try to stem the spread of COVID-19, and the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. The Council meeting ended up being virtual, and members of the StoryCorps team were immediately called back to their home states. It was a scary time, to say the least. The ICPSR staff, as a whole, had their last day in the office on Friday, March 13, 2020. The move to working from home was relatively smooth, and the ICPSR data community received continuous access to data and resources.

At the close of the fiscal year, ICPSR staff were busy planning the 2020 Data Fair, set for September 2020, rising to the moment with topics including elections, Black Lives Matter, the Census, higher education, immigration, COVID-19, and so much more. Maggie indicated that although ICPSR has been working remotely, the staff has continued to grow and has secured new projects in data collection, data archives, and data stewardship. It was awe-inspiring to see the institution pivot to its first-ever virtual ICPSR Summer Program, which drew a record number of participants.

The Consortium has been managed exceptionally well in this tumultuous time, and it will continue to move forward in the coming year.

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