The hyperbole of “big data” [1] and the surprising backlash for “small data” advocacy [2] have been well documented in popular journalism, but research data are definitely experiencing a cultural moment. Much of this excitement turns on the potential that increased accessibility, interoperability and computing power can offer to the exploration of loosely related datasets (for example, tweets and the fluctuations of a stock index like NASDAQ) [3].

Research data’s cultural moment should also be one for the field of information science. Our field has traditionally studied some of the most difficult problems in the use of large-scale information resources, including the meaningful organization, access, management and storage of scholarly products in all of their formats and encodings. But, thus far, our field has struggled to make its expertise in this area well understood, and more importantly, we've been slow to demonstrate the relevancy of our work to the vital issues that we face as an intellectual community and, more importantly, as a society [4].