NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland – The NCAA has announced a process for sharing data that assists scholarly researchers while protecting the confidentiality of the data.

Bernard Franklin, NCAA senior vice president for membership and student-athlete affairs, said at the opening of the second annual Scholarly Colloquium on Intercollegiate Athletics Tuesday that the NCAA will join Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the largest repository of data in the world – housing more than 40,000 individual data sets – and establish a Disclosure Review Committee composed of experts in the field of database management and data sharing. That group will review data being made public to ensure privacy and confidentiality.

Franklin said four data sets will be released in 2009, including a user-friendly, longitudinal graduation-rates database; a longitudinal database of team-level Academic Progress Rates; and databases from the NCAA Study of College Outcomes and Recent Experiences (SCORE) and the study of Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students in college (GOALS).

At the first Scholarly Colloquium in 2008, academics cited the difficulty in obtaining NCAA research as contributing to the lack of scholarly research on intercollegiate athletics. During that discussion, NCAA President Myles Brand said the NCAA has data that could be useful to researchers and that the Association would consider ways to make the data more accessible.

Scott Kretchmar, chair of the Scholarly Colloquium Editorial and Advisory Board and professor of exercise and sport science at Penn State, said one of the board’s goals is to impact the research and the reform decisions those data are intended to inform. “The data-sharing initiative is an important step that allows researchers to obtain sound data and make informed observations that will contribute to future policy decisions about intercollegiate athletics,” he said.

Todd Petr, NCAA managing director of research, cited complex issues involved in the process of creating data sets that are of use to researchers, but he said that the confidentiality of individuals and institutions that provided data in the first place was paramount. “We’re still learning about all the nuances, but we think we have a plan in place that will allow us to move forward with a viable data-sharing program,” Petr said. “We must ensure that our ethical and legal commitments are met before releasing any data in a public manner.”

Petr said the data-sharing plan was advised by Margaret Levenstein, the executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center, and reviewed by the NCAA Data Analysis Research Network.

Petr also said the partnership with the ICPSR will help in that regard. “We could never recreate the expertise and infrastructure that are in place at ICPSR,” he said. “Our association with them will allow us to move forward with this project at a fraction of the cost that would accrue if we were to try to build our own systems from the ground up.”