In an opinion piece for Nature, Jessica Farrell argues that librarians and digital archivists are a valuable–and yet underused–tool in making research data open and accessible for all. Farrell underlines that open-data initiatives often face many technical, legal, organizational, and financial challenges and that librarians and digital archivists have applicable experience to help tackle them. The author discusses how archivists and librarians are often overlooked due to a combination of cultural reasons, including outdated conceptions about what information management actually entails. Farrell concludes that many digital archivists and scientists share the same vision of making more data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable and should therefore partner in this endeavour.
