Religion Data Commons

Overview

The Religion Data Commons (RDC) is a multi-year collaborative initiative focused on improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of data related to religion.

This project brings together the Center for Open Science, subject matter experts, and a wide network of partners and advisors, including researchers, infrastructure and tool developers, publishers, and institutions. Through this collaboration, we will assess community needs, define the scope of a solution, and design an open, sustainable, and community-governed platform. The ultimate goal is to create a public good resource that can both accelerate the scientific study of religion and benefit downstream user communities who rely on data about religion.

The Present Challenge

Despite decades of collecting data on religion’s impacts (both positive and negative) on cooperation, conflict, economic development, health, and more, most of these data are either unavailable for reuse or else go unused. Ongoing efforts to realign incentives across academia toward openness are a necessary part of addressing this, but are insufficient on their own: researchers who work with data on religion have yet to reach a consensus on shared vocabularies and metadata standards for the domain of religion. Until that happens, data on religion will remain hard to find, hard to reuse, and hard to apply in practical contexts.

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Our Vision and Goals

We see an opportunity to help researchers who handle data on religion move toward a community-owned solution for how to make their data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable)--what we are calling a Religion Data Commons. We have three goals:

to create and sustain interdisciplinary standards for describing religion-related data–that is, to create consensus metadata standards for the domain of religion
to create and sustain community-governed infrastructure for sharing, finding, and reusing data on religion
to lower barriers for the reuse of data on religion in new research, synthesis, and application in policy, healthcare, and other practical contexts.

Interdisciplinary Scope

Researchers from every discipline related to humans–from anthropology and demography through to neuroscience and epidemiology–handle data on religion. Because there is no single community of “religion researchers” and because data collected by researchers in one discipline can often be reused by researchers in another, our goal is to build a data commons for religion that functions across all relevant disciplines.

This is easier said than done, but we’re going to try!

By working in and across disciplinary silos, we hope to enable interdisciplinary data stewardship, harmonization, and synthesis in ways that benefit both researchers who focus on the scientific study of religion and those who simply handle datasets that include religion-related variables.

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