Abstract¶
The University of California, Berkeley historically lagged behind peer institutions in research data storage, offering, on average, 200 GB per faculty member while peer institutions provided 5-30 TB. Faculty turned to ad hoc, insecure storage practices, and appealed to campus to take action. In response, campus IT, Research IT, and the Library launched a Data Storage Allocation for Faculty Pilot in late 2025, offering 5 TB per faculty across five existing storage platforms. This coordinated offering delivers secure, compliant storage options, reduces reliance on personal systems, and supports large-scale research needs. By aligning platforms, policies, and curation support, the initiative closes Berkeley’s storage gap, strengthens data integrity and compliance, and advances a future-oriented transparent ecosystem that protects research, amplifies scholarly impact through responsible sharing, and fosters sustained campus partnerships.
The pilot intentionally includes opportunities for faculty to engage with research data consultants, primarily from the UC Berkeley Library, as they make decisions on how to allocate their 5TB of storage. These consultations took place between December 2025 and March 2026. In the faculty’s appeal to campus leadership for more storage space, there was a specific request for storage to support “public interest” datasets. Given that interest, consultants advise on which storage offerings best support the needs of not only the data, but the overall research process with a focus on open, transparent practices, which can lead to more UC Berkeley research datasets being publicly available and open.
During this presentation, we will focus on the Library’s open source data storage offering, Dataverse. Described as the “Data Sharing & Publishing” solution, faculty can request up to 5 TB to provide public or mediated access to data, media, or file repositories in accordance with funder or institutional policy-based requirements. Library service providers will discuss participation in the pilot; trends, uptake and feedback via faculty case studies; considerations for other campuses; and the challenges of contributing back to Dataverse as UC staff developers.
Sam Teplitzky | UC Berkeley Library¶
Sam Teplitzky is the Open Science Librarian, and library liaison to the Earth & Planetary Sciences and Astronomy Departments at the University of California, Berkeley as well as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She works on open science, data, reproducibility, and transparency in research workflows. Sam is also a co-convener of the Bay Area Open Science Group, a virtual community of academics and researchers interested in incorporating open science into their research, teaching, and learning.
Anna Sackmann | UC Berkeley Library¶
Anna Sackmann is the Data Services Librarian and head of the University of California, Berkeley Library’s Data Services Program. Anna supports the library’s data program by licensing data acquisitions, providing support for text and data mining, and managing Dataverse, the library’s data publishing platform.