Transcript Presentation

AFRAID OF
SCOOPING?
Case Study on Perceived vs. Actualized
Risks of Sharing Research Outputs
HEIDI LAINE / [email protected] / @heidiklaine
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.
THESE SLIDES
bit.ly/fearofscooping
ABOUT ME
Doctoral Candidate in Social and Economic History at University of Helsinki, Tiina
and Antti Herlin Foundation research grant recipient
Active in the Open Knowledge Finland
Finnish Committee for Research Data (national member of CODATA) secretary
Work experience includes national research integrity office, learned societies,
national IT centre for science.
IN THIS PRESENTATION
SCOOPING
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
CASES
METHODS
RESEARCHERS MOTIVATIONS
LEARNINGS
FIND OUT MORE
FEAR OF SCOOPING
“Once the investigators who have conducted the trial no
longer have exclusive access to the data, they will effectively
be competing with people who have not contributed to the
substantial efforts and often years of work required to conduct
the trial.”
The International Consortium of Investigators for Fairness in Trial Data Sharing: Toward Fairness in Data
Sharing, N Engl J Med 2016; 375:405-407 August 4, 2016 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1605654
SCOOPING AS MISCONDUCT
Misappropriation: unlawful presentation of another person’s
result, idea, plan, observation or data as one’s own research
Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity: Responsible conduct of research and procedures for
handling allegations of misconduct in Finland - RCR guidelines, available at
http://www.tenk.fi/en/resposible-conduct-research-guidelines
SCOOPING IN OPEN SCIENCE
What misappropriation in the context of open science could look like:
• Using published research data in one’s research without crediting the data
source.
• Publishing someone’s research data from a data repository as one’s own in a
datajournal (borders on plagiarism).
• Taking a research idea from a blog and claiming it as one’s own
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Descriptive level: How two pioneering open collaboration
research projects coped with the risk of research misconduct?
Interpretive level: What allowed the researchers of the two
case projects to ignore the risk of research misconduct?
OPEN COLLABORATION CASES
Open Research Swarm / Social Media for
Citizen Participation (SOMUS), 2007-2010
NMR Lipids Project (NMRLP),
2013-ongoing
SOURCES AND METHODS
Primary sources: four interviews from four key researchers, two from each project
Interviews originally conducted for a different research question: how open
collaboration research projects practice and produce responsible conduct of
research (RCR) (on-going)
Secondary sources: open online materials (mainly NMRLP blog), interviewees
personal archives (mainly SOMUS)
Theoretical tools: oral history, cultural-historical activity theory, social psychology
of science
RADICAL OPENNESS
ORS / SOMUS
NMRLP
Open collaborative writing of research
proposal to a funding call
Participants required to give credit for ideas
also from “hallway” discussions
Funding allocated to an open online
community
Data shared via Github without embargo
Open collaborative writing of conference
papers, meeting notes, wiki
Co-authorship determined by input through
blog comments
INTERVIEWEES MOTIVATIONS
Fear of scooping as an incentive instead of disincentive: openness as a remedy.
Addressing research integrity issues a) in one’s field and b) on a research community level
(especially the processes of academic publishing).
Trust in a) immediate research community, b) in openness.
Commitment to the research subject and science as drivers, rather than competition and/or
career advancement.
Precarious freedom and career stage.
Excitement from being a pioneer.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED?
Research ethics and integrity training for researchers is vital also for advancement
of open science. Also history and philosophy of science should be taught more
broadly.
Multidisciplinarity fosters innovation: get physicists reading philosophy, engineering
scientists working with sociologists.
Data citation practices and data publication workflows should be implemented to
ensure that openness pays of and to prevent accidental scooping.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED?
Lack of gender balance indicative of women researcher’s lower tolerance of risk?
Targeted efforts for encouraging women to share.
Openness as an empowering experience should be promoted: focus on
collaboration instead of competition, on content instead of form.
Pioneers should be recognised and rewarded with funding and positions!
FULL PAPER
… will be submitted for the Data Science Journal SciDataCon special collection.
… will be available as a pre-print on zenodo.org as of 1 October 2016.
… (as all of my work) will be tweeted and blogged about, so follow me or contact
me directly: @heidiklaine / www.thehonestbrokerblog.org / [email protected]
DataONE WEBINAR
Incentives, Challenges, Barriers: Exploring social, institutional and economic
reasons for sharing data
Jens Klump, Heidi Lane, Fiona Murphy
Tuesday September 13th
9 am Pacific / 10 am Mountain / 11am Central / 12 noon Eastern
https://www.dataone.org/upcoming-webinar
THANK YOU!