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Critical deliberations concerning the Data Archiving and Research Transparency effort (DA-RT) which had been set in motion within the context of the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research (QMMR) Section had, by the Fall of 2015, resulted in multiple conference workshops and panels, email exchanges, webpage and listserv posts, and various Section newsletter publications. Most of these seemed to come from Comparative Government and International Relations (IR) scholars, who are the mainstays of the QMMR Section. Researchers in other subfields of political science—notably, public policy, public administration, public law, and political theory—were less often heard from among those deliberations. And so Peri Schwartz-Shea and I, both of us working in the first two of those subfields, convened a roundtable at the 2016 Western Political Science Association (WPSA) meeting, "Engaging DA-RT: Critical Assessments from Public Policy and Political Theory," to address this gap. The essays in this symposium—by Renee Cramer (Drake University), Samantha Majic (John Jay College, CUNY), Amy Cabrera Rasmussen (California State UniversityLong Beach), Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (University of Utah), and Nancy J. Hirschmann (University of Pennsylvania), ordered by appearance here—were developed from those roundtable presentations. (Amy T. Linch [Pennsylvania State University] was also a member of the roundtable, but she has not joined in this written compendium.) As panel chair, I set the stage for the discussion; and it is those comments that I present here, expanded to situate DA-RT in its contemporary context.

Calls for greater data access and research transparency have emerged on many fronts within professional social science. For example, the American Political Science Association (APSA) recently adopted new guidelines for data access and research transparency. APSA has also appointed the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) ad hoc committee to continue exploring these issues. DA-RT sponsored this symposium. In addition, funding agencies like the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have expanded requirements for data management and data distribution. These pressures present challenges to researchers, but they also present opportunities.