Return on Investment Metrics for Data Repositories in Earth and Environmental Sciences

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of data to the economy and to science, investment in repositories to manage and disseminate that data in easily accessible and understandable ways is scarce. Keeping repository services active and up-to-date for a long time period is difficult due to this funding situation. As a result, repositories must continually provide proof of their value, their Return on Investment (ROI) to their sponsors; yet doing so has always been difficult, problematic and not always successful. In this work, an analysis of approaches for assessing the ROI of several scientific data repositories has identified various techniques that repositories use to report on the impact and value of their data products and services. A survey of selected repositories rated the set of metrics identified and rated each by its importance as well as the ease with which the metric could be measured. The discussion is broken down into considerations for calculating costs, perceived value of repositories and suggested metrics that would allow a repository to calculate an ROI. The authors, representatives of environmental data repositories, concluded that easily obtainable data use metrics, such as data downloads, etc., have limited value while more informative analyses would require additional resources.