Institutional governance and stewardship

Redivis allows institutions to establish a shared environment for managing research data across libraries, research centers, laboratories, and other university units.

Administrative responsibilities can be distributed across institution, organization, and dataset levels, allowing institutions to support centralized oversight while delegating day-to-day stewardship to the teams closest to the data. This structure can support consistent approaches to dataset ownership, documentation, access review, retention, and continuity across research projects.

Flexible institutional governance

With Redivis, institutions can:

• Create distinct administrative units: Represent libraries, departments, research centers, laboratories, or data services as separate organizations within an institution.
• Delegate responsibility: Assign organization administrators, dataset owners, and editors without granting every contributor institution-wide administrative authority.
• Support institutional or individual stewardship: Allow datasets to be managed by individual researchers or placed under shared organization ownership when long-term institutional oversight is appropriate.
• Establish documentation expectations: Use shared dataset, table, and variable documentation tools to support institutional metadata and curation practices.
• Maintain visibility across services: Use institution and organization-level administrative views, logs, and reports to understand how data is managed and accessed.

Continuity and stewardship

Redivis can help institutions maintain responsibility for research data as projects and personnel change. Organization-owned datasets can be managed by multiple administrators, allowing stewardship to remain with the institution rather than depending entirely on one researcher.

Institutions can transfer dataset ownership in supported circumstances as responsibilities evolve. These capabilities can support administrative transitions, research departures, long-running projects, shared data services, and continued stewardship beyond the end of a grant.

Local policies determine when data should remain individually managed, when institutional ownership is more appropriate, and how access, documentation, licensing, and retention responsibilities should be transferred. Redivis's data retention practices can support these broader stewardship decisions.