APDU Data Integrity Award 2026

The inaugural APDU Data Integrity Award honors work that advances the responsible stewardship, dissemination, and use of public data. Please vote for one in each of the four categories.

All PRAMS Collaborative
Allprams.org

I enthusiastically nominate our team for the APDU Data Integrity Award for our work to protect and restore the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) in the face of unprecedented federal threats. With the termination of centralized CDC PRAMS infrastructure, states now confront fragmented support and potential cessation of data collection, with existing data now inaccessible, and ongoing erosion of institutional knowledge needed to maintain data quality and consistency.

In response, our team is leading a national convening of 40 stakeholders—including former CDC PRAMS staff, state PRAMS leaders, academic researchers, and nonprofit partners—to confront these risks head-on. Guided by APDU’s principles, we are:

- Creating a national advisory committee and working groups focused on (1) technical assistance to states, (2) logistical and legal infrastructure for sharing PRAMS data, and (3) building support for the continuation of PRAMS at the state and national levels.
- Developing concrete recommendations to sustain rigorous collection, weighting, cleaning, and dissemination of PRAMS data.
- Coordinating with regional efforts and national partners to ensure public, equitable access to high quality, confidential, ethically governed maternal health data over the long term.

Data Rescue Project
https://www.datarescueproject.org

The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a grassroots volunteer organization founded in February 2025 in response to urgent threats to federal public data. Coordinated by members of IASSIST, RDAP, the Data Curation Network and others, DRP has mobilized hundreds of volunteers to identify, preserve, and provide access to at-risk government datasets, including CDC health surveys, infrastructure data, and LGBTQ+ federal data.

DRP exemplifies responsible data stewardship across multiple APDU principles: it expands public access to data threatened with removal, maintains transparent documentation of rescue efforts through its public portal and tracker, advocates for sustainable data infrastructure, and partners globally with organizations like the Humanitarian Archive Emergency Project, Save Our Signs, the Coalition for Resilient Research Data Infrastructure (CRRDI), and PEDP. Recent efforts saved the CDC NHANES dataset and the HIFLD infrastructure layers, which are now publicly accessible through HIFLD Next.

At a moment when public data access is under an unprecedented threat, DRP has become an essential community resource. Demonstrating that distributed, volunteer-driven stewardship can protect the data the public depends on.

dataindex.us
dataindex.us

America's Data Index (dataindex.us) is a public monitoring initiative dedicated to tracking the availability and transparency of U.S. federal data infrastructure. Launched in response to growing concerns about unannounced changes to government datasets, dataindex.us gives researchers, advocates, and the public real-time visibility into dataset availability and the federal Information Change Request (ICR) process — aggregating and simplifying OMB review activity that is technically public but difficult to find and interpret.

dataindex.us exemplifies the APDU principle that Public Data Are Transparent: its ICR tracker surfaces proposed changes to federal surveys before they take effect, its dataset monitoring flags unexpected removals or failures to release as expected, and its "Take Action" feature alerts users to open comment periods so the public can engage directly with federal data governance decisions.

Open data efforts on police use of force
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/30679125.2026.2681580

Dr. Brittany Freelin and Dr. Claire Kelling's recent publication in Evidence Base, documenting use-of-force transparency practices across 47 cities in the United States, represents a significant contribution to public data accessibility and accountability. The work systematically evaluates how police departments across the country release use-of-force data to the public, identifying patterns in how departments aggregate, format, and present data in ways that can facilitate independent analysis by community members and researchers, if done effectively.

The research is explicitly oriented toward expanding public access to and use of policing data and equipping communities to advocate for greater transparency from their own departments. By creating a comparative framework across these 47 jurisdictions, the work makes visible the wide variation in departmental transparency practices and gives community organizations concrete tools to evaluate and challenge the data practices of their local departments.

This work is already being used in conversations by community organizations in the Twin Cities of Minnesota as they advocate for detailed public release of policing data in formats that serve community analysis. This effort is an example of rigorous research on public data practices in service of community needs and priorities.