Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

This paper reports on a qualitative meta-analysis that aimed to identify, qualify, and conceptualise territorial barriers to interorganisational data sharing (IDS). The meta-analysis adopted a total of 69 semi-structured interview transcripts, gathered in two previously completed case studies in China. Case study 1 aimed to develop strategies to overcome barriers to interagency sharing of government data in the development of China’s smart government services. Case study 2 was carried out to investigate and resolve the lack of inter-hospital sharing of patient data in China’s healthcare referral services. By adopting a thematic analysis approach, the meta-analysis pointed to 21 territorial barriers to IDS, which emerged in three themes: psychological ownership, territorial behaviours, and interorganisational dynamism. Territorial barriers that hinder IDS have not been systematically investigated to date. This paper offers a theoretical basis for future studies and serves as a call for more research on territorial barriers in data sharing activities.

Research data sharing is embedded in policies, guidelines and requirements commonly promoted by research funding organizations that demand data to be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” and FAIR. This paper discusses the challenges of balancing privacy protection with data sharing in a PhD project involving long-tail, small-sized qualitative human subjects’ data. Based on experiences and feedback from project participants, we argue that privacy protection is about respecting the participants and their self-image. This can be achieved through dialogue and involvement of the participants building on the principles of shared stewardship. Further, we suggest that de-identification and plain language consent materials are better at protecting privacy than anonymisation, which in a digital data environment is difficult to achieve and not necessarily a sensible approach for qualitative data, where the gold is in the details. The literature indicates that it matters to participants whether data are reused for research or other purposes, and that they trust the institutions. This supports our claim that research data services must find better solutions for restricted sharing when necessary.

This study develops a grounded theory of how social scientists use resources to facilitate qualitative data deposit and the impacts on making data FAIR and CARE. Drawing from 15 semi-structured interviews with U.S. academic social science faculty who deposited data to ICPSR, I take a resource-centric perspective to address the need for theorizing scientists’ use of resources to bridge the gap between underspecified, heterogeneous data practices and repository requirements. The two primary contributions of the study are: First, I identify three types of resources that social science faculty use to structure data deposit routines: 1) bottom-up, 2) top-down, and 3) borrowed resources. Second, I import a theory from crisis informatics, ‘routine infrastructuring’ to explain how social scientists deposit data to ICPSR. Results reveal that the resources social scientists use function as ostensive routines. I argue routine infrastructuring is not only a way to enact routines, but also one that creates routines. Findings also show that scientists’ use of resources developed ‘in-house’ has a mix of beneficial and negative impacts for making data FAIR and CARE. The study advances the small but growing body of literature that examines routine dynamics from a resource-centric perspective to explain successful data deposit to repositories.

Large investments of public funds to curate huge volumes of various physical samples acquired and stored over decades, and in some cases centuries, provide ample reasons to make these items as openly accessible, as easily discoverable, and as well-documented as possible to ensure this investment results in reuse. The purpose of this study is to understand the curation behaviors of managers of physical collections. Six focus groups were conducted with twenty participants from several physical sample communities. Participants responded to open-ended questions that relate to the entire data lifecycle for their research objects. Results indicated that physical collections would benefit from use of universal metadata and data storage standards to increase sharing across domains. Both of these factors contribute to access and use obstacles all these collections face in different ways. In the context of managers requiring more investments to encourage reuse of these invaluable items, this study hopes to provide preliminary domain-agnostic data to inform design of collections cyberinfrastructure, resources, and services using actual curation behaviors.