Data Access as Regulation

Abstract

This article considers calls for data transparency as research regulation and accountability. Rather than arguing for or against the value of sharing data, the article argues that understanding the call for data sharing requires questioning assumptions embedded in the debate about the context of scholarship and rethinking the purposes of data access. The article first argues that the spread of information available digitally means that researchers in the academy and outside it work with digital information, quite apart from mandates for data access. Second, replication as an accountability measure is often offered as one reason for making data available. However, scholars of replication have argued that replication has multiple components, many difficult to enact. Demands in universities for grant funding, impact by standard metrics, and newsworthy research encourage rapidly produced scholarship and research that makes big innovative claims. However, replication imposed sporadically cannot regularly counter these systematic incentives. If one purpose of data access is to regulate the research enterprise, scholarship on regulatory strategies and the difficulty of accomplishing goals via mandates illuminates the call for data access. Replication operates as a threat, one seen to generate incentives for good science, but is erratically enforced. Borrowing from the scholarship of audit and regulation, the article uses regulation, including audit, as accountability to argue that the sciences might need to address fundamental concerns about trust.

Qualitative research at the crossroads of open science and big data: Ethical considerations

“…Although scholars have initiated important conversations about consent and qualitative data sharing (e.g., Campbell et al, 2023;Hesse et al, 2019;Kirilova & Karcher, 2017;Sterett, 2019;VandeVusse et al, 2022), there remains a broad need for further investigation into, and critiques of, all aspects of open science practices and big data to mitigate potential harms.…”

Composite actors as participant protection: methodological opportunities for ethnographers

“…The need for trust is not unique to composites but essential to academia in general. Indeed, mandated data sharing requires trust as well (Sterett, 2019).…”

“…Political science may well be an outlier when compared to other disciplines [4]. Yet it seems unlikely that these challenges will abate for newer generations of ethnographers who face not only increased difficulty of protecting identities of research participants and pressures to share data and be "fully" transparent by "documenting every step in the research process" (B€ uthe and Jacobs, 2015, p. 61), but also the increasing competition to demonstrate research "impact" (Sterett, 2019) in a context where, at least for those scholars who aspire to policy relevance, "evidence-based policy making" fails to recognize ethnography's existence (see, e.g. Orchowsky, 2014).…”

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Law and Courts

“…Sometimes that debate is captured as a difference between quantitative data, sometimes assumed to be easily shared, and sensitive interview data that is not. However, that debate misses how much that first, sharing work product without having built trust is difficult, and second, that regulations protect some digitized data from sharing because they are also sensitive (Sterett, 2018).…”