By SWright | February 23, 2016
Late last year, a colleague at Innovations for Poverty Action, Stephanie Wykstra, and I started having conversations about reuse of open data and what we do and don’t know about the re-use of existing data sets, particularly which data sets and how they are used. We are also interested in the specific challenges researchers face as they try to re-use data sets collected for other research purposes. Stephanie and I would like to start filling this gap so we are putting out a call for case studies.
If you have re-used data for your own research (or know someone else who has), we would love to hear about it! The parameters and further details for the call can be found in this blog post on the Mozilla Science Lab blog: https://www.mozillascience.org/share-your-story.
We are particularly interested in stories of data re-use that are not from large-scale surveys or census data sets as there are many examples of those. We are also aware of some instances where large data repositories collect information on use of data sets housed in their collections (see ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature and UK Data Archive). While we will be incorporating some of those cases in our report, we’d like to hear more about stories that may not be included in those collections.
There is a very simple form at the blog post linked above. We are basically interested in:
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What made the data that you re-used valuable for your own research?
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What made the data easy or challenging to re-use?
and
- Your advice to researchers who are sharing their data for re-use.
The deadline for submitting case studies is March 10, 2016. We will make all responses publicly available in a report after an analysis of the responses (with your permission). Depending on funding, we may be able to sponsor researchers who provide case studies to a workshop on data re-use. Please spread this call far and wide to any you think would be interested in participating.
If you have questions, feel free to tweet or email either Stephanie Wykstra (@Swykstr) or myself, Stephanie Wright (@shefw). We appreciate any support you can provide!