Where does Canada's social science research data live? An evaluation of data disposition

This paper will bring together information from different sources to evaluate the current disposition of Canadian social science and related research data. It will review the more than 20 repositories hosting Canadian social data. Sources of information about Canadian data include the Re3data international data registry and National Research Council Canada Gateway to Research Data, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Portage project and the Fairsharing data directory, Canadian open government resources, and commercial resources like data.mendeley.com add substantial additional information about Canadian social sciences research data. This review will document the subjects covered, and organizational connections between repositories and the consortia efforts working to coordinate Canadian data collecting. The paper will compare social science repositories to the larger body of data repositories. It will compare government provided data sources, academic, institutional, subject based shared consortia data sources, and publisher based collection data approaches. The paper will outline the considerable progress which is being made in data collection. It will also delineate major issues still to be addressed. Though Canada's data landscape is particular to Canada its course of development and problems will be instructive for other countries developing data services and resources.