OPEN DATA PRACTICES: BENEFITS TO SCIENCE FROM SLOW BUT CERTAIN ‘CULTURE CHANGE’

Anneke Zuider­wijk joined TU Delft in 2011 as a PhD stu­dent. Dur­ing her doc­tor­ate stud­ies she inves­ti­gat­ed which socio-tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture can enhance the coor­di­na­tion of open data use. In one of her case stud­ies, Anneke analysed the data col­lect­ed, stored and open­ly shared by the Dutch Min­istry of Secu­ri­ty and Jus­tice. Now an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at TU Delft Fac­ul­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, Pol­i­cy and Man­age­ment, Anneke con­tin­ues explor­ing the field of open data and describes her research as fol­lows:

My research is focused on the devel­op­ment of the­o­ry for incen­tiviz­ing open data shar­ing and use through infra­struc­tur­al and insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ment

Anneke Zuider­wijk

“My research is focused on the devel­op­ment of the­o­ry for incen­tiviz­ing open data shar­ing and use through infra­struc­tur­al and insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments. Infra­struc­tur­al and insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments can vary in dif­fer­ent research/societal areas and also for dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers (i.e. researchers, gov­ern­ment, indus­try and cit­i­zens). An exam­ple of an infra­struc­tur­al and insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ment for researchers in rela­tion to the chal­lenge of “lack­ing skills to use open research data” can be improv­ing the ease of use of open data por­tals (infra­struc­tur­al arrange­ment) in com­bi­na­tion with manda­to­ry researcher train­ing for using such por­tals (insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ment).”

When asked about her moti­va­tions for pub­lish­ing her datasets, Anneke says:

“To be pub­lished in a sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal is a moti­va­tion. In high-qual­i­ty papers it is nec­es­sary to share the data. I always add a note in my arti­cles indi­cat­ing that the data will be avail­able. I think it gives more trust to review­ers. I think it is a plus point to get the arti­cles pub­lished.”

Pub­lish­ing the data that sup­port her pub­li­ca­tions and research find­ings has become a com­mon prac­tice for her, and Anneke wants to make it the norm for her stu­dents too.

“Cul­ture for open sci­ence changes very slow­ly. My own change towards open data took some time. The first time I pub­lished a dataset, it was because of the require­ments from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion who was fund­ing the project I worked on. Then I thought, I still have a lot of data from my PhD work, so I decid­ed to share it on 4TU.ResearchData. Now, I encour­age my stu­dents to pub­lish their data on the archive as well…if you pub­lish a report or an arti­cle, pub­lish your data!”

“I real­ize that the stu­dents also need guid­ance get­ting their work­flows in place. They need to have in mind cer­tain prac­tices when they are plan­ning their projects and the col­lec­tion of the data. For exam­ple, what infor­ma­tion and doc­u­men­ta­tion they need to col­lect in order to make the data under­stand­able for oth­ers. The first time I did this for my PhD data it took me a long time. If I would have known about what I need­ed and how to share my data even at the half-way of my the­sis, it would have helped.”

In her recent pub­li­ca­tion, Anneke explored the moti­va­tions for researchers in the field of astro­physics for pub­lish­ing and shar­ing data. She con­duct­ed nine inter­views with researchers to col­lect infor­ma­tion about their prac­tices and chal­lenges when pub­lish­ing data. 

“For this study I did inter­views, which I can not share in order to pro­tect the iden­ti­ty of the researchers. But, I can still share the method­ol­o­gy, pro­ce­dures and stan­dards used for analysing the data. I can also share the analysed data and the code book. All this data can be use­ful for some­body else, if not for my future self.”

Anneke has cho­sen 4TU.ResearchData as the plat­form to pub­lish her datasets. When we asked her about the ben­e­fits of using this archive, she says:

“It is very intu­itive how to use the archive, even when you use it for the first time. It allows you to pro­vide meta­da­ta, which improves find­abil­i­ty and re-usabil­i­ty of the data. And, you get sup­port from the data cura­tors. Some­body actu­al­ly looks at what you sub­mit and sends you sug­ges­tions on how to improve the qual­i­ty of your dataset. For exam­ple, they sug­gest­ed that I pre­pare a ReadMe file as part of the doc­u­men­ta­tion of the dataset, which con­tains use­ful infor­ma­tion for oth­ers that would like to use the data”

Link to the dataset on 4TU.ResearchData.
Cov­er image by vish­nu vijayan via Pix­abay