Promoting the Reusability of Shared Data

This event is part of our Social and Decision Analytics Seminar Series. 

Speaker: Sarah Nusser, Research Professor, Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, University of Virginia

Collaborators: 
Alyssa Mikytuck, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Randolph-Macon College
Gizem Korkmaz, Senior Research Scientist, The Coleridge Initiative

Abstract: Transparency in the evidence used to support research findings has long been a central tenet of scholarly research. For centuries, research publications and presentations that outline the goals, methods and results of a study have been the basis for research transparency. More recently, research transparency has focused on public access to the data (and other outputs) used to generate the findings as an important element of the paradigm of open science/open research. Making research data publicly accessible is now expected by federal and non-profit research funders as well as many journals. However, most scholarly fields do not have tradition of preparing to share their data publicly. Researchers new to making their data publicly accessible experience considerable burden and receive limited rewards for data sharing. In addition, researchers who use publicly accessible data find the data difficult to use due to insufficient documentation and lack of support from those who shared the data.

We conducted a qualitative study of researcher practice to better understand what data users need from data producers and how data producers can change their practice to reduce their burden and increase the usability of the data they share. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of experiences for data producers and data users. I will then focus on data reusability, highlighting data reuser processes and what kind of resources they need to evaluate and use shared data. Finally, I hope to engage in a discussion of how this model aligns with your experiences as SDAD researchers who use publicly accessible data.