Members of the Texas Data Repository Steering Committee, who represent a diverse range of data management and curation experts at a variety of public and private academic libraries in Texas, U.S., are working together to develop a research data retention policy. While establishing the policy and guidelines, members of the ad-hoc working group recognized that many institutions with research data repositories will face the challenge of establishing research data retention policies. Beyond a lack of common practices to model local policies, institutions will also face numerous hurdles, including adopting a policy that is: flexible enough to address a growing diversity of research data, aligned with evolving funding agency and local institutional mandates, and economically sustainable over time. This roundtable will focus on better understanding what research data retention policies are and how they are formed.

As individuals who work with repositories to facilitate open research (including open access and open research data), we have all seen cases where ‘champions’ of openness deliberately or inadvertently ignore best practice guidelines for making outputs and research data freely accessible. We may, in fact, be the guilty party ourselves in some instances because of resource pressures.

During this roundtable we will discuss the common issues that prevent us, and the communities we support, from promoting research transparency by actively following current best practice in repository use. Examples for discussion include: ‘Data available upon reasonable request’, articles about open access/open research not being made open access, pressures related to repository staffing and skills, etc. Through anecdotal examples we will share our experiences of these common blockers to repository best practice and explore potential solutions that participants can use in the future.