Data Sharing in Social Sciences: Case Study on Charles University

Abstract

Data sharing is an important building block for data-intensive science, but it is highly dependent on researchers’ behavior. According to our recent research, both academics and doctoral students at Charles University are willing to share data, but at the same time they expressed various concerns about data sharing. In our present study, we focus on the group of social science researchers. We use the data from a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. We collected 1,434 completed questionnaires, from which 279 fall into the social sciences category. It seems that social scientists are less willing to share their data; their data is more often unavailable; and they are more concerned about potential ethical and legal problems. Interviews with select social scientists provided more details on the motivators and inhibitors of data sharing, with data character and content seen as the greatest obstacles to data sharing.