The IQSS Dataverse Network offers an open repository which provides a framework to publish, preserve, cite and get credit for your data, and allow others to replicate and verify your social science research work. Data files can be made publicly available or selectively restricted. The Dataverse Network Project has helped, and continues helping, to preserve and disseminate original data sets, improve research results, give full recognition for researcher’s work and foster collaboration. 
 
The Dataverse Network Project is housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Coding of the Dataverse Network software began in 2006 under the leadership of Merce Crosas and Gary King. We benefited considerably from our experience with our earlier Virtual Data Center (VDC) project, which spanned 1999-2006 and was organized by Micah Altman, Gary King, and Sidney Verba as a collaboration between the Harvard-MIT Data Center (now part of IQSS) and the Harvard University Library.  Precursors to the VDC date to 1987, comprising such entities as a stand-alone software guide to local data, preweb software, and tools to transfer cataloging information by FTP to other sites across campus automatically at designated times.