Research Data Commons established as service center

The RDC has exciting news to share. On July 1st, 2025, the IU Research Data Commons (RDC) officially became a service unit of the Vice President of Research, funded and coordinated jointly with UITS and IU Libraries. This coordinating service has involved significant investment from IU Research over several years, and matching commitments from our partners at UITS and the Libraries (IUB, Ruth Lilly Medical Library, and IUI). Leadership of the RDC is shared between Matt Link (Associate Vice President, Research Technologies), Diane Dallis-Commentale (Ruth Lilly Dean of IU Libraries), and Kosali Simon (IU Distinguished Professor, representing IU Research). Simon emphasized the role the RDC plays in not only increasing access to resources but also coordinating across different units. “As a researcher, I’m excited to see this infrastructure where our research data service partners in Research, IT, and Libraries come together, building on the excellent ways they already support us. This new unit isn’t replacing what these three groups do—it’s a way to coordinate and amplify their strengths, with joint ownership by the original providers.”

From the initial workgroup and report in 2022 to the present, the RDC has made significant progress in supporting production, sharing, and collaboration around research data infrastructure across Indiana University. “Managing, storing, and creating an environment where research data collections, including open (free), shared, licensed, and IU owned content will help all IU researchers advance their work. The Research Data Commons and services have been developed collaboratively by experts across IU and will evolve with the needs of researchers” Dallis-Commentale said. The RDC has completed Phase 1 of a “front door” for researchers by collecting resources and FAQs on our website, hosted approximately 10 events, made substantial progress on a secure enclave for data, and received approval to support a new comprehensive research data policy. Our priorities for our first year as a service center will be to grow our researcher-facing knowledge base, launch the secure enclave with initial high-value data resources, open a service to centrally administer and manage key data assets of IU, create a data management plan drafting service for proposal-writing faculty, and support the drafting of a research data policy.

You can learn more about our activities by joining our monthly newsletter.