Developing a community-driven strategic plan to promote resilient infrastructures for federally funded scientific data
The Center for Open Science (COS), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), is leading an initiative to address a central challenge: how can we build a more resilient research data ecosystem that is resistant to single points of failure?
The research data system is inherently complex, spanning hundreds of repositories, thousands of staff, and data practitioners across many domains. Addressing this challenge therefore requires coordination: converging on shared solutions to track and mitigate risk, enabling collective action, tracking progress, and ensuring shared accountability. The Coalition for Resilient Research Data Infrastructure (CRRDI) is designed to meet that challenge.
COS has convened experts across research, policy, and data infrastructure to develop CRRDI’s strategic plan. A draft of the plan will be released in Summer 2026 for broader input to ensure the strategy is rooted in the community’s most urgent needs and reflective of its experiences.
Federally funded research data is a public good — paid for by the people for a societal purpose — and persistent and reliable access to that data is critical to maximizing its value. Yet, repository systems and associated tools have long been at risk due to funding uncertainties, staffing constraints, and policy changes. In 2025, the sudden removal of public datasets from multiple U.S. agency websites underscored the urgent need for resilient systems to safeguard and maintain public access to data produced by federally funded researchers. While CRRDI is focused on federally funded research data in the U.S. context, many of the strategies outlined in the plan should be considered within a global framework.
CRRDI's strategic plan is organized around three pillars:
Pillar 1. Assess and monitor the repository landscape. Understanding where the research data ecosystem is most vulnerable and how those risks evolve over time is essential to advancing resilience. This pillar focuses on developing a shared, community-led maturity model to enable actors that support federal data infrastructures to create and adopt resilient risk management strategies. This approach will leverage and harmonize existing frameworks to promote convergence and adoption, rather than duplication of effort.
Pillar 2. Lay a strong, resilient foundation for stewardship. Building on Pillar 1’s risk and gap analysis strategies, this Pillar charts a roadmap to an ecosystem that is prepared for and responsive to times of crisis. This includes coordinating actors to maximize the efficiency and sustainability of infrastructure investments, as well as establishing a multisectoral, pre-competitive space for repositories, infrastructure providers, funders, and policymakers to align on standards and advance shared stewardship practices.
Pillar 3. Develop a shared outreach and advocacy strategy. Long-term resilience depends on awareness and support for research data as a critical public good. Grounded in the findings from PIllars 1 and 2, this pillar will equip the broader community with the tools, messaging, and capacity to act. This includes coordinating with related initiatives, developing public communication and advocacy toolkits, and building community capacity to access preserved datasets, report at-risk resources, and advocate for sustained investment in resilient research data infrastructure.
CRRDI’s strategic plan is being developed by a planning committee of experts from organizations that serve as connectors across the research data infrastructure community. This process is informed by an ongoing landscape analysis of existing related efforts to ensure our approach is complementary and can act as an anchoring framework around which the community can organize to promote our shared vision for a more resilient ecosystem.
In June 2026, COS will release a draft of the co-developed strategic plan for broader community input, seeking feedback and buy-in from those committing to work together to implement the plan. The strategic plan will include an outline of governance model options, participation expectations, accountability mechanisms, and funding strategies to ensure CRRDI can carry out this work sustainably beyond the initial planning phase. Those interested in learning more can reach out to data-resilience@cos.io.
DataCite and ROR
Maria leads DataCite’s Global Community and Services team, where she is responsible for the organization’s product vision and community strategy and coordinates strategic initiatives across the organization and with external partners. As part of her role, she also directs the Research Organization Registry (ROR). Prior to joining DataCite, Maria worked on research infrastructure and scholarly communications at the California Digital Library, the UC Berkeley Library, and PLOS.
Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE)
Joel Gurin is the President of the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to harness the power of open and shared data for the public good. Before launching CODE in 2015, he wrote the book Open Data Now (McGraw-Hill) and led research on open data at the NYU GovLab. He previously served as Chair of the White House Task Force on Smart Disclosure, which studied how open government data can improve consumer markets, and as Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau of the FCC. For more than a decade he was Editorial Director and then Executive Vice President of Consumer Reports, where he directed the launch and development of ConsumerReports.org, which was then the world’s largest paid-subscription information-based website.
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Campostella Research and Consulting
Robert Hanisch recently retired from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD, where he was the director of the Office of Data and Informatics in the Material Measurement Laboratory. We were responsible for improving data management and sharing practices for all of NIST, developing and operating our public data repository (data.nist.gov). He also led the development of the NIST Research Data Framework (RDaF), a five-year effort to aggregate community consensus on best practices for research data management, and was an active member of the OSTP/NSTC Subcommittee on Open Science.
Northwestern University
Kristi Holmes is Associate Dean for Knowledge Management and Strategy and Director of the Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She serves as Director of Informatics and Data Science at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute and Chief of Knowledge Management at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (I.AIM). Her work centers on advancing discovery and access to knowledge through collaborative initiatives that promote data standards, FAIR principles, and a robust sharing ecosystem. She is particularly focused on measuring the impact of research and developing strategies that accelerate translation and innovation.
University of Pennsylvania Libraries & the Data Rescue Project
Lynda Kellam is the Director of Research Data & Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, where she leads a team supporting research data management, data science, GIS, digital humanities, AI, and institutional repository services, and is a co-founder of the Data Rescue Project. Her research focuses on preserving at-risk public data, advancing FAIR principles, and supporting qualitative and mixed-methods research, and she is the co-editor of Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice (2016). She is the current Secretary of IASSIST, an international data professional organization, and an incoming member of ICPSR’s Governing Council.
San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego
Christine Kirkpatrick leads the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s (SDSC) Research Data Services division, which manages large-scale infrastructure, networking, and services. Her research is in AI/Machine Learning (ML), with a focus on the intersection of ML and research data management. Christine served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) and is the Secretary General of the International Science Council's Committee on Data (CODATA).
Data Foundation and PREreview Advisory Committee
Christopher Steven Marcum is an open-science advocate, sociologist, and science policy wonk. He previously served as Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He brings experience shaping Federal public access policies and Open Government Data Act implementation to this project.
Earth Science Information Partners
Mark is the interim Executive Director for the Earth Science Information Partners. He has a long history of researching, developing, and implementing data stewardship policies, practices, and systems. He was the first Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance and has helped coordinate stewardship of a broad range of data from satellite remote sensing to Indigenous knowledge of Arctic change.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI)
Katherine Skinner is an open knowledge researcher-activist with deep commitments to community building, organizational resilience, and systems thinking. She serves as Director of Programs for Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to driving investment in and adoption of open infrastructure to further equitable access to information. She has served as Principal Investigator for more than 25 research projects funded by foundations and federal grants and has published extensively on open access, open infrastructure, community building, and knowledge curation.
University of Washington
Alex Wade is an independent consultant and guest faculty at the University of Washington iSchool, specializing in open access, open science, and academic knowledge graphs. A former academic librarian, Alex’s career spans roles at Microsoft Research, Amazon, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Science. He brings experience from both technology development, research funding, and open science advocacy perspectives.

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