Four waves of development in Citizen Science: a global to local view of a field in motion

The twelfth annual Dataverse Community Meeting was held at the World Trade Center in Barcelona on May 12-15, 2026.

THIRD DAY KEYNOTE: Four waves of development in Citizen Science: a global to local view of a field in motion

The Dataverse Project is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others' work more easily. Researchers, journals, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility.

A Dataverse repository is the software installation, which then hosts multiple virtual archives called Dataverse collections. Each Dataverse collection contains datasets, and each dataset contains descriptive metadata and data files (including documentation and code that accompany the data). As an organizing method, Dataverse collections may also contain other Dataverse collections.

The central insight behind the Dataverse Project is to automate much of the job of the professional archivist, and to provide services for and to distribute credit to the data creator. Before the Dataverse Project, researchers were forced to choose between receiving credit for their data, by controlling distribution themselves but without long term preservation guarantees, or having long term preservation guarantees, by sending it to a professional archive but without receiving much credit. The Dataverse Project breaks this bad choice: we put a Dataverse collection (a virtual archive) on your website that has your website's look, feel, branding, and URL, along with an academic citation for the data that gives you full credit and web visibility. Yet, that page of your website is served up by a Dataverse repository, with institutional backing, and long term preservation guarantees. See King, G. (2007). An Introduction to the Dataverse Network as an Infrastructure for Data Sharing. Sociological Methods & Research, 36(2), 173-199. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124107306660. Please use this paper to cite the Dataverse Project.

The Dataverse Project has grown considerably over time and is now a major international collaborative project.  We encourage you to join us.