Data can be like a gift, something you share for the benefit of others. To that end, the mission of the Center for Open Science is to foster sharing and facilitate research transparency. As more researchers are willing to open up their data to others, some new questions arise:
"Which repository should I choose?"
"Who owns the data? Do I have copyright on the raw data I collected, or do the participants who provide the data retain the copyright? Or is there no copyright at all?"
"If I reuse data from someone else, do I have to offer them co-authorship?"
The research community must establish new norms concerning these questions, and often several values have to be balanced, such as the balance between the right of first data usage and the goal of data reuse by other researchers.
Recently the German Research Foundation (DFG), the largest public funder of research in Germany, updated their data management policy. They explicitly claim that data from publicly funded research belongs to the public and should be openly available, while respecting the privacy rights of the participants where necessary. Furthermore, they called on specific scientific disciplines to implement these general guidelines for their field.
In response to this call, the German Psychological Society (DGPs) initiated an extensive process of developing recommendations for open data management in psychology, with the input of many members of the society and experts. The recommendations give very detailed and practical advice on many issues around data sharing. In a blog post, I describe the process and the guiding principles of our recommendations.
Read the full blog post here (http://www.nicebread.de/open-data-recommendations/).
The recommendations, in English, are available on PsyArXiv, the original German version is published here.
The German Psychological Society wishes to get in contact with other international initiatives in order to discuss compatibility with existing other guidelines and to think about a harmonization of several guidelines within psychology. Don't hesitate to contact me!
