Rethinking Data Sharing and Human Participant Protection in Social Science Research: Applications from the Qualitative Realm

Authors : Dessi Kirilova, Sebastian Karcher

While data sharing is becoming increasingly common in quantitative social inquiry, qualitative data are rarely shared. One factor inhibiting data sharing is a concern about human participant protections and privacy.

Protecting the confidentiality and safety of research participants is a concern for both quantitative and qualitative researchers, but it raises specific concerns within the epistemic context of qualitative research.

Thus, the applicability of emerging protection models from the quantitative realm must be carefully evaluated for application to the qualitative realm. At the same time, qualitative scholars already employ a variety of strategies for human-participant protection implicitly or informally during the research process.

In this practice paper, we assess available strategies for protecting human participants and how they can be deployed. We describe a spectrum of possible data management options, such as de-identification and applying access controls, including some already employed by the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) in tandem with its pilot depositors.

Throughout the discussion, we consider the tension between modifying data or restricting access to them, and retaining their analytic value.

We argue that developing explicit guidelines for sharing qualitative data generated through interaction with humans will allow scholars to address privacy concerns and increase the secondary use of their data.

URL : Rethinking Data Sharing and Human Participant Protection in Social Science Research: Applications from the Qualitative Realm

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-043

 

Standardising and harmonising research data policy in scholarly publishing

Authors : Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Aliaksandr Birukou, Mathias Astell, Sowmya Swaminathan, Amye Kenall, Varsha Khodiyar

To address the complexities researchers face during publication, and the potential community-wide benefits of wider adoption of clear data policies, the publisher Springer Nature has developed a standardised, common framework for the research data policies of all its journals. An expert working group was convened to audit and identify common features of research data policies of the journals published by Springer Nature, where policies were present.

The group then consulted with approximately 30 editors, covering all research disciplines, within the organisation. The group also consulted with academic editors and librarians and funders, which informed development of the framework and the creation of supporting resources.

Four types of data policy were defined in recognition that some journals and research communities are more ready than others to adopt strong data policies. As of January 2017 more than 700 journals have adopted a standard policy and this number is growing weekly. To potentially enable standardisation and harmonisation of data policy across funders, institutions, repositories, societies and other publishers the policy framework was made available under a Creative Commons license.

However, the framework requires wider debate with these stakeholders and an Interest Group within the Research Data Alliance (RDA) has been formed to initiate this process.

This paper was presented at the 12th International Digital Curation Conference, Edinburgh, UK on 22 February 2017 and will be submitted to International Journal of Digital Curation.

URL : Standardising and harmonising research data policy in scholarly publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/122929

Recommended versus Certified Repositories: Mind the Gap

Authors : Sean Edward Husen, Zoë G. de Wilde, Anita de Waard, Helena Cousijn

Researchers are increasingly required to make research data publicly available in data repositories. Although several organisations propose criteria to recommend and evaluate the quality of data repositories, there is no consensus of what constitutes a good data repository.

In this paper, we investigate, first, which data repositories are recommended by various stakeholders (publishers, funders, and community organizations) and second, which repositories are certified by a number of organisations.

We then compare these two lists of repositories, and the criteria for recommendation and certification. We find that criteria used by organisations recommending and certifying repositories are similar, although the certification criteria are generally more detailed.

We distil the lists of criteria into seven main categories: “Mission”, “Community/Recognition”, “Legal and Contractual Compliance”, “Access/Accessibility”, “Technical Structure/Interface”, “Retrievability” and “Preservation”.

Although the criteria are similar, the lists of repositories that are recommended by the various agencies are very different. Out of all of the recommended repositories, less than 6% obtained certification.

As certification is becoming more important, steps should be taken to decrease this gap between recommended and certified repositories, and ensure that certification standards become applicable, and applied, to the repositories which researchers are currently using.

URL : Recommended versus Certified Repositories: Mind the Gap

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-042

Just Curious: How Can Academic Libraries Incite Curiosity to Promote Science Literacy?

Author : Siu Hong Yu

Based on a Bright Young Minds webinar given on February 7, 2017, this paper shows the importance of nurturing curiosity in students as an integral part of information literacy (IL) and science literacy. There are obvious parallels between « Research as Inquiry, » as described in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) and scientific inquiry.

In both cases, curiosity is the fuel that drives information gathering and the pursuit of new knowledge. This paper discusses three pedagogical strategies to help information literacy librarians incite curiosity in students and promote scientific literacy.

Bright Young Minds is a webinar series hosted by the Ontario Library Association’s Education Institute. It provides a platform for MLIS students and recent graduates to share their research and to foster connections between academic schools and information professionals.

The webinar and this subsequent article grew out of an MLIS project exploring the concept of curiosity and its application in promoting scientific literacy in academic libraries. I draw on my dual experiences as both a Chemistry graduate student and participant in IL sessions, and as a recent MLIS graduate and IL instructor.

URL : Just Curious: How Can Academic Libraries Incite Curiosity to Promote Science Literacy?

Alternative location : https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3954

 

What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

Authors : Marco Schmitt, Robert Jäschke

Twitter communication has permeated every sphere of society. To highlight and share small pieces of information with possibly vast audiences or small circles of the interested has some value in almost any aspect of social life.

But what is the value exactly for a scientific field? We perform a comprehensive study of computer scientists using Twitter and their tweeting behavior concerning the sharing of web links.

Discerning the domains, hosts and individual web pages being tweeted and the differences between computer scientists and a Twitter sample enables us to look in depth at the Twitter-based information sharing practices of a scientific community.

Additionally, we aim at providing a deeper understanding of the role and impact of altmetrics in computer science and give a glance at the publications mentioned on Twitter that are most relevant for the computer science community.

Our results show a link sharing culture that concentrates more heavily on public and professional quality information than the Twitter sample does. The results also show a broad variety in linked sources and especially in linked publications with some publications clearly related to community-specific interests of computer scientists, while others with a strong relation to attention mechanisms in social media.

This refers to the observation that Twitter is a hybrid form of social media between an information service and a social network service.

Overall the computer scientists’ style of usage seems to be more on the information-oriented side and to some degree also on professional usage. Therefore, altmetrics are of considerable use in analyzing computer science.

URL : What do computer scientists tweet? Analyzing the link-sharing practice on Twitter

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179630

Quels choix juridiques pour la médiation culturelle et scientifique dans l’environnement numérique ?

Auteur/Author : Lionel Maurel

La dimension juridique n’est pas forcément celle à laquelle on songe en premier lorsque l’on envisage les «enjeux numériques pour la médiation scientifique et culturelle du passé».

Pourtant, tout autant que la technique, le droit est devenu aujourd’hui un facteur essentiel d’interopérabilité dans l’environnement numérique. Tout projet culturel ou scientifique produisant des données et/ou des contenus doit s’interroger sur les conditions juridiques de mise à disposition de ces objets, sous peine que ces questions ne se posent ensuite a posteriori, en provoquant alors souvent difficultés et blocages pour ne pas avoir été suffisamment anticipées.

Cette dimension juridique est néanmoins de plus en plus importante pour les institutions culturelles (archives, bibliothèques, musées, etc.), ainsi que pour les équipes de chercheurs à mesure que la démarche du Linked Open Data (LOD) se développe et place les porteurs de projets devant des choix souvent complexes à effectuer.

L’ouverture des données implique en effet d’être en mesure de choisir entre plusieurs licences parmi le panel d’outils contractuels existants pour les appliquer à différents objets, sachant que leurs effets varient sensiblement et ne sont pas neutres pour les réutilisateurs en aval.

La visibilité des projets, leur capacité à nouer des relations avec d’autres initiatives et les formes même de médiation qui pourront être mis en oeuvre auprès de différents publics découlent en partie des décisions qui auront été prises à propos des conditions d’utilisation des données et contenus.

Le présent article vise à décrire les principes de base à partir desquels ces choix peuvent être effectués dans de bonnes conditions. En particulier, cet article s’attachera à montrer que faire le choix de l’ouverture par le biais de licences adaptées constitue un atout pour le développement de la médiation autour des données de la recherche.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01577998/

 

Information in the ecosystem: Against the “information ecosystem”

Authors : Timothy B. Norris, Todd Suomela

The “information ecosystem” metaphor is widely used in academic libraries and has become nearly ubiquitous when speaking of the information systems that support scholarly communication and varied forms of data sharing and publication.

The trending use of this language arises from non-academic applications — for example in big data (the Hadoop ecosystem) or software development (the node.js ecosystem) — and there remains little critical examination of the use of this metaphor.

Indeed, the definition of ecosystem as the set of relations between living organisms and their surrounding non-living environment is apparently not directly a part of the metaphor.

This paper first describes the emergence of ecological thinking and how it was influenced by early information science and then explores how different “ecologies” are used within the academy, including in the emergent field of information ecology.

A short critique of the metaphor is then posed and the paper concludes that the information ecosystem metaphor is useful, yet at the same time there are dangerous elements that render aspects of human societies and natural ecosystems invisible.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6847