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Membership

Membership in ICPSR is available to institutions. Our membership includes over 600 educational and research institutions from around the world. ICPSR members include universities and colleges, national data archives, statistical and research agencies, government departments, and nonprofit and commercial organizations.

While most memberships cover a single campus or institution, many have combined to form an ICPSR federation -- a consortium of institutions that join as a group and receive discounts on membership fees.

Individuals at member institutions have direct, free access to all of ICPSR's data resources and user support. They also receive discounted tuition rates and travel stipends for courses in ICPSR's Summer Program in Quantitative Methods.

For information on membership fees, refer to How to Join ICPSR or send an email to netmail@icpsr.umich.edu.

To determine if you are at a member institution, visit our member list.

Benefits of Institutional Membership

For a reasonable annual fee, members have campuswide access to ICPSR's vast data archive and to the full range of ICPSR resources and services, including the renowned Summer Training Program in Quantitative Methods.

Benefits

  • Direct access to ICPSR data holdings. ICPSR Direct is service that provides direct access to the ICPSR data holdings for all students, faculty, and staff at ICPSR member institutions. With ICPSR Direct, any user with an authorized IP address from a member institution may download data from ICPSR, without going through a local campus representative
  • "One-stop shopping" and convenience. ICPSR provides efficient search tools to locate data, an ordering facility that permits expeditious access to data, and timely announcements of new data releases and updates to existing collections.
  • Data integrity. Users can rely on ICPSR to distribute the most recent versions of data and to resolve problems.
  • Preservation of data. ICPSR considers the preservation of data in perpetuity to be a fundamental part of its mission, thus ensuring that valuable data resources are secured for coming generations of social scientists. Off-site storage of data guarantees that a copy of a data collection will always be available.
  • Consulting and technical help. ICPSR has 40 years of experience in archiving, processing, and supporting data use.
  • Evaluation of data and checks for accuracy. All ICPSR data and documentation undergo evaluation and review as they are acquired.
  • Data enhancements. ICPSR augments many of its data acquisitions with electronic documentation and SAS, SPSS and Stata setup files to facilitate analysis; some collections are intensively processed to make them easier to use. Detailed descriptions of the data holdings are provided as well. Custom subsetting and analysis facilities are available online for some collections.
  • Access to training and instruction at discounted rates. Members of ICPSR receive discounted tuition and travel stipends toward this renowned training program in quantitative methods.
  • Cost-effectiveness. The cost of membership in ICPSR is inexpensive compared with many other memberships and database subscriptions purchased by institutions. And the ICPSR membership benefits all social scientists across a campus.
  • Self-governance. Through the ongoing dialogue that membership affords, members have input into matters of data acquisition, processing priorities, and distribution media and formats.
  • Networking of institutions. ICPSR's model of Official Representatives who are actively engaged in assisting users promotes exchange of information among campuses.
  • Partnership among scholars. Through membership, scholars cooperate in the creation and deposit of data for redistribution within the research community for secondary analysis. This aspect of "realizing" the scientific method through replication, verification, and extension of findings makes ICPSR an integral part of the infrastructure of social science research.

Need more information about ICPSR? Visit our Publications and Promotional Materials page.

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