Social Science Research Council

The Data Consortium is an SSRC-led initiative that seeks to improve access to datasets used in media and communications policymaking. The consortium includes a wide range of educational and non-profit partners, from university-based schools, departments, and libraries, to public interest groups and professional associations.

The consortium is focusing initially on improving access to commercial datasets, which have become primary inputs into media and communications policymaking. Firms such as Nielsen Media Research, Arbitron, and BIA Financial Network compile much of the data on which policymakers rely, ranging from industry structure, to audiences, to content. Often, there are no alternatives.

In most cases, access to these datasets is priced for media corporations, not for scholarly or public interest actors, or even for federal agencies. The latter generally have very limited access to data, and then only on highly restrictive terms. For many reasons, this inequality is a recipe for poor public policy. Public-interest participation in policymaking is hampered, and independent scrutiny of policy proposals and outcomes is made more difficult. As this situation becomes the norm, media policymaking moves away from basic principles of public accountability.

The consortium is a vehicle for expressing the data-related concerns and collective bargaining power of scholarly and public-interest constituencies in this area. The consortium is organized around a few core objectives:

• Improve educational and other non-profit access to commercially-produced datasets, especially through cooperation with commercial data providers.
• Facilitate projects that address persistent 'data gaps' in our understanding of the public sphere.
• Expand researcher engagement with datasets, in part by collecting and disseminating information about the uses of different datasets and their terms of access.
• Advocate for the principle that public policy should be based on publicly-available data.

We believe that the interests of researchers, public-interest groups, policymakers, and commercial data providers intersect around these simple goals. The Data Consortium will work to expand both access to data and in so doing expand and routinize the market for commercial data purchases. It will work to improve data collection, and also the ability of researchers and policymakers to use it.