Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Tuesday 14th July, 16:00 - 17:30 Room: O-106

The New Data Sharing Environment: Increasing Options, Increasing Access 1?
Convenor	Dr Peter Granda (University of Michigan )

Session Details

The New Data Sharing Environment: Increasing Options, Increasing Access?

Peter Granda
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
University of Michigan

As social science funding agencies throughout the world place increasing emphasis on data sharing, both data producers and data repositories face new challenges. Data producers must fulfill public-access requirements when receiving funding awards. After their data are collected, they may be tempted to share the data themselves, but they often do not want the maintenance responsibility for the long term. Data repositories can offer the infrastructure and staff expertise to assist producers in meeting their responsibilities as good data stewards but must decide how much effort to expend to archive, curate, and preserve the increasing amounts of data being generated.

New options have appeared on the scene including data sharing sites like Dropbox and Figshare and “self-deposit” services hosted by social science data archives. These options offer a variety of mechanisms to deposit and publish data resources, different pricing models, and storage models that range from keeping the original bitstream for a definite period to a full preservation commitment including curation and migration of these files indefinitely.

This session brings data producers and data repositories together to present their views of the current and future data sharing environments. Key questions at this session:

• How do producers want to make to make their data available for secondary use?
• Should the output of data from all funding sources be preserved?
• Who decides which data files should be stored for the short term and which should receive permanent curation and preservation?
• Who should pay for the costs of data sharing? The funder, the person awarded the grant, national governments through their support of national archives, another entity?
• What types of repository structures best promote data access?

Paper Details

1. Strengthening and Widening the Data Archive Research Infrastructure
Mr Paul Jackson (CESSDA)

CESSDA, the European Research Infrastructure for data archive services to the social sciences, is launching a number of important change initiatives to widen and strengthen the network of data archives in the European Research Area. This paper describes those initiatives, setting out the vision, objectives and aims of the work, and the opportunities for data archives, social scientists, data depositors, research councils and ministries. It looks ahead to new data sources, new user requirements, and new data services, and how Europe's data archives are planning to meet these challenges.

2. Data Retention and Public Opinion in the Administrative Data Research Network
Miss Tanvi Desai (Administrative Data Research Network)
Miss Melanie Wright (Administrative Data Research Network)
Dr Kakia Chatsiou (University of Essex)

This paper will outline key messages from recent research into public attitudes to data retention, as well as the legal framework in the UK. The paper will discuss the impact this has on the returns to investment in data preparation and research, and outline some of the arguments for and against the preservation of administrative data for research. Finally we will look at strategies for gaining a better understanding of measures that can be taken to reassure the public; and for enhancing public understanding of the advantages of data retention.

3. Data Availability and Reuse — Results of An Empirical Study Among German Researchers
Mr Benedikt Fecher (DIW & HIIG)
Mr Marcel Hebing (DIW)
Mr Friesike Sascha (HIIG)

Shared research data in academia is associated with considerable benefits. It makes studies reproducible and enables other researchers to ask new questions based on old data. Thereby data sharing in academia makes research more transparent and fosters innovation. However, curating, archiving and making data available for others is far from being the rationale for good scientific practice. The research project "Data Sharing in Academia" http://data-sharing.org aims to identify factors for efficient data re-use.

4. SowiDataNet – How to Counteract the Growing Disparity of the Data Landscape in the Social and Economic Sciences in Germany
Ms Monika Linne (GESIS Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften)

At present, the holding of research data in Germany is heavily fragmented, which precludes a user-friendly, centralized and therefore quick data retrieval. On the contrary flexible data distribution and the reuse of research data are becoming increasingly relevant. Therefore, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in collaboration with the Social Science Centre Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research, and the German National Library of Economics started the development of SowiDataNet. The overarching – and so far in Germany unique – objective is the implementation of an infrastructure for decentralized research data from the social and economic sciences in Germany.

5. Trusted Digital Repository – Sustainable Access
Mr Dag Kiberg (NSD (Norwegian Social Science Data Services))

The implementation of an open access policies relies on good data management, including long-term preservation and permanent access to data resources. Without preservation, there will be no access, open or otherwise. However, preservation is not a guarantee that data are stored in a secure and accessible form. The presentation will discuss the main obstacles to data archiving and data sharing across scientific fields and strategies to overcome these.