Public defense: Madeleine Dutoit

This dissertation places itself within the area of Scholarly communication research of Library and Information Science

 It investigates the relationship between researcher and research data and researcher and data sharing from a researcher perspective.

The purpose of this thesis is to enrich our understanding of researchers’ data sharing in the context of the open data initiatives of external authorities. 

To make research data findable and accessible is a part of the ongoing open science movement. Accessible and reusable research data are stated to increase possibilities to resolve societal challenges and strengthen competitiveness.

Stakeholders within the scholarly communication ecosystems use data policies to steer how researchers share research data. Researchers must therefore increasingly respond to requirements about making generated research data accessible.

The new data sharing initiatives have potentially comprehensive implications for how research will be carried out in the future.

In this case study, an interdisciplinary, international research group of 18 researchers within the STEM disciplines was investigated.

The researchers encountered a data policy via their Horizon 2020 funding and had to make research data accessible in a research data repository and develop a data management plan.

The empirical material consists of transcribed interviews, observation notes, and documents that were collected over the period of over a year.

Wenger’s community of practice was used as conceptual framework to direct attention to the researchers’ shared perspectives of data practices.

The study’s aim was to elucidate the researchers’ conceptualisations of research data and the ways in which data sharing is an element interwoven in various practices arising from participation in an interdisciplinary community that is bound by a data policy.

Three specific research questions were posed.

1. How are data negotiated and reproduced within the group? What are data to the researchers, and when?
2. How do researchers mutually account for the data policy?
3. How do the views on research data and data policies relate to how researchers aim to share data? How can data sharing be imagined as a constitutive yet negotiable element in interdisciplinary research practices?

The results showed an unexpected complexity regarding the researchers’ perspectives on data.

They shared a definite conceptualisation of data as experimental results and measurements. In parallel the term data was elastic and used inclusively for several types of information.

Significant differences in terminology use and material representations of data were found between theoreticians and experimentalists. The understanding of the concept was not discussed and appeared to be anchored in the researchers’ training. 

Notwithstanding the researchers’ well-developed skills in data sharing, the encounter with the policy revealed a lack of knowledge necessary for being able to respond to the data policy.

A learning process was initiated while the group tried to avoid changing their existing data sharing practices. The researchers viewed the policy’s indicated data sharing methods as meaningless, as opposed to their existing data sharing practices.

The essential meanings of data sharing were embedded within what were seen as important activities, or not; how data were shared with others was deeply anchored within well motivated routines developed to meet their needs.

Because of these understandings, together with fear that outsiders would not understand the data, competing claims, and lack of a suitable repository, the policy had few implications for how the researchers aimed to share data.

The policy’s long-term effects should however not be disregarded.

The insights of this thesis are valuable because policymakers, research funders, developers and providers of academic support and librarians need to be able to relate to researchers’ views on data and data sharing when developing appropriate directives and satisfactory research services during the transition to open science.