ICSSR Data Service: A National Initiative for Sharing of Social Science Research Data

The ICSSR Data Service emerged as an answer to persistent demand across the globe for open availability and sharing government and research data collected or developed through public funding. Objectives of the open data movement are perfectly aligned to other “open movements” such as open source, open access, open standards, open hardware and open content. The ICSSR Data Service was initiated by ICSSR, New Delhi, with the aim to promote data sharing and reuse, and to provide open access to social science research data/datasets at a national level. The article elaborates on background, genesis and implementation strategy adopted for setting up ICSSR Data Service. It enumerates on data sets available in the repository, its types and format, stakeholders, access and reuse policies of data and metadata, data versioning and current status of ICSSR Data Service. The article enunciates on organization of data in repository and features and functionality of ICSSR Data Service including search, browse and discovery options. The article elaborates on “Explore Online” tool that facilitated online visualization of data as charts, tables, graphs and maps using various visualization tools and techniques. Further, it elaborates on the inbuilt online “ICSSR Data Analytic” tool developed using “R” language. Lastly, the article states practices to be followed for citing data so as to help other researchers to identify and locate the source of referenced data.