ASU Research Data Repository: Technical infrastructure snapshot ; architecture, operations, and sustainability in practice

With more than 140 Dataverse installations worldwide, the Dataverse community reflects a wide range of technical architectures, policy choices, and service models. This presentation and associated poster offers a practical snapshot of Arizona State University’s Dataverse installation, highlighting how infrastructure, operational decisions, and researcher-focused services work together to support sustainable research data publishing. The first half of the presentation focuses on the technical foundations of ASU’s Dataverse, including our overall deployment approach and operational practices that support reliability, sustainability, and cost awareness. We will discuss how infrastructure choices, access considerations, and ongoing operational needs influence system design, and briefly touch on how we are exploring AI-assisted tools to support system operations. This discussion will emphasize practical decisions that improved stability and long-term maintainability. The second half of the presentation focuses on how ASU’s Dataverse operates as a research-facing service. We will discuss how the platform is used in practice to support data sharing and publication, how collections are organized to serve different research communities, and how our team works with researchers throughout the deposit and curation process. Using real-world examples, we will reflect on researcher expectations, common challenges, and how service, policy, and technical decisions shape the overall user experience. Framed by the repository’s mission as, “... a platform for ASU-affiliated researchers to share, preserve, and publish research data in a way that ensures long-term accessibility, usability, and citation”, this presentation connects infrastructure decisions to service outcomes specific to ASU. Attendees will gain insight into how one large institutional Dataverse balances technical sustainability with hands-on research support, providing a transparent look at our choices, tradeoffs, and lessons learned.