The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an emerging metadata standard for the social sciences. The DDI is in active use by many data specialists and archivists, but researchers themselves have been slow to recognize the benefits of the standards approach to metadata. This paper outlines how the DDI has evolved since its inception in 1995 and discusses ways to broaden its impact in the social science research community.
The availability of workflows for data publishing could have an enormous impact on researchers, research practices and publishing paradigms, as well as on funding strategies and career and research evaluations. We present the generic components of such workflows to provide a reference model for these stakeholders. The RDA-WDS
This issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics highlights the ethical issues that arise when researchers conducting projects in low- and middle-income countries seek to share the data they produce. Although sharing data is considered a best practice, the barriers to doing so are considerable and there is a need for guidance and examples. To that end, the authors of this article reviewed the articles in this special issue to identify challenges common to the five countries and to offer some practical advice to assist researchers in navigating this “uncharted territory,” as some termed it. Concerns around informed consent, data management, data dissemination, and validation of research contributions were cited frequently as particularly challenging areas, so the authors focused on these four topics with the goal of providing specific resources to consult as well as examples of successful projects attempting to solve many of the problems raised.
This paper reviews the archival process at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a repository of digital social science data, and maps ICPSR's Ingest and Access operations to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. The paper also assesses ICPSR's conformance with the archival responsibilities of ''trusted'' OAIS repositories, with the proviso that audit criteria for archival certification are still under development. The ICPSR to OAIS mapping exercise has benefits for the larger social science archiving community because it provides an interpretation of the reference model in the quantitative social science environment and points to preservation-related issues that may be salient for other social science archives. Building on the archives' long tradition of shared norms and cooperation, we may ultimately be able to design a federated system of trusted social science repositories that provides access to the global heritage.
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