Open research data, an archival challenge?

Abstract

The Swedish government has decided that all research results in the form of research data and scientific publications financed with public funds should be openly accessible as far as possible. The question is whether the responsible actors and if the universities are ready to implement the change. The significance of open access has amplified in Sweden. Earlier research has brought to light that the collection and preservation of research data are often surrounded by ambiguous rules and lack a comprehensive structure. For example, archiving is not given enough consideration in connection to research projects and researchers often tend to save their material on platforms that are not persistent over time. This article is based upon a qualitative research approach where 15 semi-structured interviews have been used as primarily data sources to investigate the implementation of open access of research data and scientific publications. The article investigated how Swedish universities and public authorities were working with archiving and implementation of open research data and their opinions on open access. The results displayed a lack of coordination, resources and infrastructure but also that common agreed nomenclature were missing. The management of research data was not part of an overall recordkeeping strategy. One explanation could be differences in the information culture among researchers and archivists. Social sciences theory has been combined with archival theory in order to explain the reasons to this. These have been put in relation to the principles of the open data directive.

Investigating the division of scientific labor using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

“…For example, several countries have established policies requiring the sharing of data created through funded research. Interviews with scientists, however, have revealed strong social and technical challenges to fulfilling these mandates (e.g., Borgerud & Borglund, 2020). Data curation work continue to be widely underresourced, despite increasing calls for data transparency (Leonelli, and the overwhelming importance of this work, as demonstrated by our analysis.…”

Opening Research Data: What Does It Mean for Social Sciences?

“…Another particularity of social sciences is data anonymity and de-identification, which is often confused with confidentiality (Borgerud & Borglund, 2020). Replacing identity markers by an identifier that has no meaning to anyone has long been traditional practice in research, but now, in the era of big data, it offers no real assurance that a data subject's identity is protected.…”

Improving Opportunities for New Value of Open Data: Assessing and Certifying Research Data Repositories

“…Enabling additional uses by scientists from other disciplines, as well as non-scientists, heightens that value. Archival activities should facilitate secondary value by enabling new uses (Borgerud & Borglund, 2020;Schellenberg, 1956, as cited in Jaillant, 2019. Infrastructure that enables new uses further increases the value of data as a result of such second-order benefits of reuse (Carrera & Hoyt, 2006).…”