Preliminary Results of Online Questionnaire

The online questionnaire  closed on Monday 5th November and had been answered by 70 researchers. The survey comprised 20 questions asking for information about the researcher, their data sharing habits, their opinions of the possibility of openly sharing their data and the utility of a policy bank service. The first ten questions were as follows:

• What is your academic discipline?
• What is your subject?
• How long have you been a researcher?
• In which part of the world is your research institution based?
• Do you generate research data/materials/programs etc?
• What kind of data/materials/programs do you generate?
• Where do you currently store you digital data?
• Where do you currently store your non-digital data?
• How accessible are your data/materials/programs to other researchers?
• Are your data/materials/programs etc sharing habits going to change in the future?

Most of the respondents worked in the disciplines of Science or Social Science, however there were representatives from a substantial range of fields which means that the self selecting  sample was from a cross-section of research disciplines. The most frequently listed subject was some variety of Information Studies and around 33% of respondents were actively working on a PhD or M/Phil and roughly 30% had been post qualification researchers for between 5 – 14 years. The respondents were overwhelmingly based in Europe and nearly all of them considered that they generated some sort of data, which was mainly qualitative, but there was an equal balance between textual and numerical data.  Most people stored digital data on own computer and at a work server. The favoured form of other digital storage was Dropbox. However, when it came to non-digital data, many more people stored that at their workplace. Surprisingly around 56% of respondents already share their data, albeit with their colleagues. Slightly more researchers thought that they were unlikely to change their sharing habits (approx 37%) than change their sharing habits (36%).

The least number of respondents were from the field of Economics, one respondent was studying for a MSc, and fewer respondents had been working as researchers for over 15 years. Geographically, a very small number of respondents were based in South America and Africa, and a very few people answered that they did not generate any data. Visual Data was the least form generated. Few respondents stored digital data on a disciplinary digital or archive,  or non-digital data at an external repository. One correspondent appeared to destroy all raw data after research publication. None of the correspondents answered that they shared data with no-one, although certain researchers  shared only with their research partner. A few considered that they would share less of their data in future, while a small number of researchers were not able to share because of the sensitive nature of the data.

Questions 11 – 20 will be analysed and reported next week.

 

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