Welcome to the ToBeClear Project

Public access to federally collected data in the United States is under threat by shifting political stances regarding the collection, funding, and maintenance of federal data sets and through limiting access to the tools that make those data sets available. If your research uses federal data in any way, even if it is only using a federally maintained online library site, e.g., the Department of Education's ERIC database, we invite you to share that research dependency with your peers. 

It is vital that as a research community, we share, with each other and the broader public, the importance and value of federal data sets to our research. It is also a longstanding professional and ethical standard that we commit to research transparency (see DART Statement, 2016; ICPSR, 2013; Malički et al., 2023). This includes noting if cited data are restricted in any way, including by no longer being publicly available.