Sharing, Reusing, and Repurposing Data -  Professor Christine Borgman, UCLA
Channel: Oxford e-Research Centre
Date: 2013-06-03

The Oxford e-Research Centre was pleased to welcome Professor Christine Borgman, to present a seminar on 21st May 2013, as part of our Trinity 2013 seminar series.

Christine Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. She is the author of more than 200 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. Here in Oxford she is Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow & Lecturer at Balliol College and an Academic Visitor at both the Oxford e-Research Centre and Oxford Internet Institute.

ABSTRACT

Why do researchers share data? Why do researchers not share data? Why are funding agencies requiring investigators to release their data? Why are journals requiring authors to provide their data to reviewers and readers? 

Data sharing has become an end itself with little attention to the "why" questions. Most arguments for data sharing fall into one of four categories: 

 - To reproduce or to verify research
 - To make results of publicly funded research available to the public
 - To enable others to ask new questions of extant data
 - To advance the state of research and innovation (Borgman, 2012)

These arguments do not align neatly with the incentives and disincentives for researchers to share their data, nor do they acknowledge important distinctions between sharing, reusing, and repurposing data. Data are not easily transferred between contexts due to the domain knowledge required and to differences in how data are created, used, and interpreted. 

This talk is based on an Oxford-based book project to open up the black box of "data," peering inside to explore behavior, technology, and policy issues

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Reference: 
Borgman, C. L. (2012). The conundrum of sharing research data. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(6), 1059--1078. doi:10.1002/asi.22634