First Forays into Research Data Dissemination: A Tale from the Kansas City Fed

The Federal Reserve System3 has a longer tradition of doing economic research than disseminating data from economic research. Each of the 12 Reserve Banks and the Board of Governors have research departments that together publish nearly 1,000 working papers and journal articles annually. Unfortunately, researchers have not often made the data from their papers publicly available until recently. A new program at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City aims to correct this imbalance and make such data available for reuse in other research. As a pilot participant in a new dissemination platform, we have educated economists, built metadata specifications, recruited contributors, collaborated with technology and legal staff, and coordinated and built coalitions across multiple functions at our institution and others. This paper outlines the challenges faced and obstacles overcome as we created the infrastructure and workflow and took steps toward making the publication of research data a regular part of the research life cycle.