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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Data Access With Federal Administration’s Transition

The challenges of data access during federal administrative transitions can happen every four years. What follows are some resources that might be useful. We will continue to update this blog post with new information. If you have any links that could be helpful, please send csde@uw.edu your updated and helpful information. We know that what follows may not provide you with the exact data you need, so let us know what you need and what’s missing and we can try to find where it is located. If you have data that needs hosting, we can also provide you with suggestions for where to do so at UW.

Every four years an endeavor takes place to refresh the End of Term Web Archive. It’s a coordinated project to archive parts of the federal web before the end of a presidential term. See this website. It is currently processing 300 TB of the last administration’s public administration files.  Another place to look is the Way Back Machine.  The Data Rescue 2025 Github site is one place to learn about what has been rescued and how to rescue data.

The UW libraries is maintaining a Library Guide about Federal Data Access. You can find that page here. They also have freely available government datasets ingested into UW Libraries-licensed databases like Sage Data, Simply Analytics, and others with lock icons next to them here. The libraries team of federal data librarians can be contacted at that site, if you have questions about what is available.

One place to check for some available demographic data are the resources at the University of Minnesota.  Additionally, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan provides DataLumos (https://www.datalumos.org/datalumos/) which is a crowd-sourced and open-source resource for government data archiving.  There is also the Public Environmental Data project that will soon have about 52 massive datasets coming online. You might also check data repositories like the UW Dryad collection for environmental science data and publications.

There are third party sites, as well, such as

  1. the Registry of Research Data Repositories https://www.re3data.org,
  2. Data Commons (owned by Google),
  3. Proton
  4. Policy Map (https://www.policymap.com/) (they also have provided a recent link to rescued data on their site: https://policymap.wpengine.com/blog/purged-federal-agency-data-available),
  5. the St. Louis Fed (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/),
  6. Census Reporter (https://censusreporter.org/),
  7. ESRI (https://www.esri.com/en-us/home) which, e.g., provides mapped ACS data (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/esri-demographics/latest/regional-data/acs.htm).
  8. Flourish and Thrive Labs has archived CDC data here. For now, they are providing these data free of charge to state and local public health agencies, contact: cdcdatarequest@fandtlabs.com and provide the following information in your email: name, 1️⃣ Your Name, 2️⃣ The name of the health department where you work, 3️⃣ What dataset you need and for what date ranges. If you don’t know the name of the dataset, describe what you are trying to do.
  9. BryanGeoDemo offers access to many recent public health and demographic data.

There are also tools for archiving data.  Here are some links for you:

For keeping up-to-date on data and for finding additional resources:

  • Check out the Federal Register for updates on legislation and policy changes.
  • The Federal Data Forum is a place to share messages, materials, and announcements related to the U.S. federal statistical system and federal data products.
  • America’s Data Index monitors America’s federal data infrastructure from dataset availability and new releases to planned and unplanned changes to collections.
  • Social Science Space brings social scientists together to explore, share and shape the big issues in social science, from funding to impact. This online social network features blogs with the most current thinking from key players in social science, a forum for discussions, a resource center with free videos, reports and slides that support these discussions, as well as funding and job opportunity notices.
  • Wanting to preserve data? Find data? Gather new data?  Send an email to csde_help@uw.edu or email CSDE’s favorite UW Library partner Kian Flynn (flynnk7@uw.edu) . Both are places where you might be able to find support for locating, pulling, scraping, and retaining data.
  • The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) is a nonprofit advocacy organization working to promote and advance the social and behavioral sciences in federal policymaking, which posts lots of content relevant to our work as researchers in the current moment.  Check out their Washington Update for the latest information on research-related policy change and activities.

 

Keeping Up With UW-Relevant Federal Policy Updates and Federal Administration Research Policy

The research community is facing a period of rapid change and uncertainty in the federal funding landscape. The university is closely monitoring changes and their potential impacts to the UW research enterprise. Information on the Office of Research’s Guidance on Federal Administration Research Policy page is updated frequently. If you are a researcher and interested in receiving updates, please subscribe to PI Federal communications (you’ll need UWNETID). The Provost’s office is also maintaining a site for all Federal Policy Updates.

Opportunities to Publish Research Policy Briefs with the Association of Population Centers

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers, and through them can offer you or your colleagues the opportunity to have new or forthcoming research that you want to share with policymakers, journalists, educators, or other non-academic audiences. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB), in collaboration with APC, is working to improve the dissemination of population and reproductive health findings. If you have peer-reviewed research on population dynamics, population health, or reproductive health that you would like to share with a broader audience in an easily digestible format, APC and PRB may be able to help.  To learn how, visit their website and take a look at recent research policy briefs.

Preprint Opportunities through Association of Population Centers

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers and through them can offer you and your colleagues access to their preprint publishing platform. Research Scientists, Postdoctoral affiliates and faculty are invited to submit to the APCA Working Paper Series which gathers and disseminates original population science research papers. These working papers are authored or coauthored by scholars who are faculty or postdoctoral affiliates of the Association of Population Centers (APC) population centers. Working papers can also be authored by ABD student affiliates of APC population centers (CSDE Trainees that are ABD); faculty affiliates must submit the papers on student affiliates’ behalf. Papers in the series include works in progress and pre-publication versions of articles. Many of these papers will be subsequently published in journals or edited volumes.

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Grants (Rolling)

The Bradley Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation that honors the principles and example of its namesakes, Lynde and Harry Bradley, by pursuing a mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism. The foundation has a rolling proposal process around grants for its Constitutional Order and Informed Citizens initiatives. Projects should have budgets between $25,000 and $200,000.

Funded projects in the past have focused on original intent and constitutional principles, the role of free markets in democracy, the ethical and moral foundations of capitalism, and American exceptionalism. Since this is a private foundation with a particular substantive orientation, all applications must be coordinated through Andrew Storms in UW Corporate and Foundation Relations. Reach out to Andrew Storms (as89@uw.edu) or Sarah Guthu (guthu@uw.edu) in the Executive Office of the President & Provost, if you have questions about this opportunity.

Cha Publishes Article on Education and Dementia Risk in Demography

CSDE Affiliate Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) and co-authors just published an article in Demography, titled “How Does the Risk of Dementia Change With Each Additional Year of Education?”. The authors leverage the 2000–2018 Health and Retirement Study to evaluate how dementia risk changes with each year of education among non-Hispanic White and Black older adults. The results show a linear decline in dementia incidence with increasing years of educational attainment, both before and after 12 years of education. This pattern is consistent across population subgroups. To read more, click here.

Glass Develops Roadmap for Causal Inference in Human Biology

CSDE external affiliate and former CSDE T32 Fellow Delaney Glass (University of Toronto) and co-authors recently published an article, “Toward New Directions in Human Biology: A Roadmap for Anthropological Causal Inference With Observational Data” in the American Journal of Human Biology. The roadmap that Glass and co-authors developed begins with theory development, defines causal questions and estimands, employs directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to clarify assumptions, and evaluates key identification criteria prior to statistical analysis. To read more, click here.