Louise Corti, the UK Data Service’s Director of Collection Development and Producer Relations discusses incentives to extend data publication in journals to qualitative research.
data transparency
Over the past couple of years I have been fortunate to have been riding the wave of the recent transparency agenda emerging in political science, know as the DA-RT (Data Access and Research Transparency). In 2012 the American Political Science Association (APSA) took a collective decision to integrate DA-RT principles into its Ethics Guide, adhere china rcs data to the 2014 Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, and adopt a Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement (JETS). On January 16 2016 a diverse and key set of leading journals in the field will release the first set of new DA-RT policies.
While data replication procedures are already fairly well-embedded for quantitative research-oriented journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) or Research and Politics which have their own stringent replication requirements (see example of a replication policy), the positon for qualitative research data is in an emergent phase. In my involvement with this US-based initiative in advising on how to extend data publication in journals to qualitative research, I want to set out some observations about how I think this is likely to be taken by the research community in the US, and in the UK too. My views are based on a 25-year stint in the world of research data sharing in the UK, commonly adopted by many academics with public funding. I also sat on a panel on open data at the recent Political Science Association (PSA) annual heads conference where we discussed this issue.