Kilts Center Relies on Globus Sharing for Data Distribution

The James M. Kilts Center for Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has relationships with a variety of companies interested in making their data available to eligible scholars for academic research. The result is a rich archive of longitudinal data, some of which dates back 20 years. For the Kilts Center, the goal is to democratize data resources and catalyze important, cutting-edge multidisciplinary research.

Data Distribution Challenges

As the academic clearinghouse for a multitude of datasets, the Kilts Center transfers hundreds of terabytes of data each year to universities around the world. A decade ago, as the center was developing the infrastructure and processes to support the initiative, they came to Globus looking for a way to quickly and securely disseminate the data to subscribers. They also needed the solution to be highly scalable and secure, with a clean, automated workflow that would be simple for researchers to use.

File Sharing with Globus

The Kilts Center has been using Globus to distribute data to thousands of users moving large volumes of data in and out of the Center over the past ten years. More than a decade ago, the Kilts Center turned to Globus to provide the secure data access, sharing and distribution platform they needed. Since that time, they have utilized Globus to improve efficiency in their data distribution processes.

Today, it is easy for Kilts Center to share datasets with their many researchers with just a few clicks. Researchers request to join the distribution and receive permission to access a data collection where the data lives; then they simply log in using their institutional credentials and access the data files.

Prior to 2022, the Booth Help Desk would receive hundreds of Kilts-related tickets on a monthly basis. Each ticket required several manual steps, which made for tedious and slow processing. The new and improved process saved time and money.

Kilts Center was also able to integrate Globus into other processes to best meet its users’ needs. For example, one dataset contains more than 10 TB of data (and is growing each year), and few users need the entire dataset. Kilts Center built a custom online application that lets researchers search for, and select exactly the categories and years of data they need. The user then can simply download the data that is required instead of the entire dataset.

Research Impact

Thanks to the Kilts Center system powered by Globus, thousands of researchers have been able to pursue research using data from multiple providers such as Nielsen, TransUnion, Numerator and Syndigo. Globus helps democratize data, thereby making it possible for scholars at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and at other academic institutions, to easily replicate research studies.

• The papers supported by the Kilts databases cover a wide range of topics spanning disciplines like marketing, economics, accounting, and public health.

• Many of the papers have direct implications for public policy, such as the impact of company ESG initiatives on consumer sentiment and behavior and the potential for financial data privacy to fight poverty.

• Many of the studies have been published in leading academic journals in marketing, economics, and science.

A few notable research studies made possible by this collaboration include:

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