Attitudes towards Open Science and Public Data Sharing: A Survey among Members of the German Psychological Society.

Abstract

Central values of science are, among others, transparency, verifiability, replicability and openness. The currently very prominent Open Science (OS) movement supports these values. Among its most important principles are open methodology (comprehensive and useful documentation of methods and materials used), open access to published research output, and open data (making collected data available for re-analyses). We here present a survey conducted among members of the German Psychological Society (N = 337), in which we applied a mixed-methods approach (quantitative and qualitative data) to assess attitudes towards OS in general and towards data sharing more specifically. Attitudes towards OS were distinguished into positive expectations ("hopes") and negative expectations ("fears"). These were un-correlated. There were generally more hopes associated with OS and data sharing than fears. Both hopes and fears were highest among early career researchers and lowest among professors. The analysis of the open answers revealed that generally positive attitudes towards data sharing (especially sharing of data related to a published article) are somewhat diminished by cost/benefit considerations. The results are discussed with respect to individual researchers' behavior and with respect to structural changes in the research system. Abstract: 187 words Key words: open science, public data sharing, attitudes towards open science: data sharing hopes and data sharing fears Word count (excluding tables, figures and references): 3.847

Attitudes and Practices of Open Data, Preprinting, and Peer-review - a Cross Sectional Study on Croatian Scientists

“…In recent survey in the United Kingdom with 1724 participants 21% of them have had experience depositing primary data in online repositories although they have very positive opinion about data sharing (13). In a recent survey among members of the German psychological society (N=303) Abele-Brehm et al construct a scale measuring hopes (10 items, Cronbach α=0.90) and fears (4 items, Cronbach α=0.67) towards data sharing, and the positive attitude – “hopes” were neutral (around 3.0), but their experience with data sharing was not measured (21).…”

“…Although one-question measuring is a useful method for “snapshot measuring” (20), measuring attitudes with only a single question is generally not considered an optimal approach. To the best of our knowledge, no studies, except the Brehm et al study (21) and Curty et al (22), used a scale (and reported on its reliability and validity) to measure attitudes toward any aspect of open science. It was, therefore, our goal to construct and validate such a scale and use it to explore attitudes of Croatian scientists towards it.…”

Reported individual costs and benefits of sharing open data among Canadian academic faculty in ecology and evolution

“…Open data practices also remain controversial among academics due to perceived individual costs in today's hypercompetitive research environment [22][23][24][25][26] . Many researchers feel a sense of ownership over their data and fear that potential individual benefits do not make up for future publications lost by relinquishing priority of access to the data they collectedthe fear of being 'scooped' 4,6,13,27 .…”

“…Research to date has centered on understanding the opinions of researchers in order to identify 'motivations and enablers' or 'fears and barriers' to data sharing 5,10,18,26,[31][32][33][34] . A recent systematic review of researcher's attitudes towards open data identified five factors that strongly influence data sharing: seniority, age, lack of time, loss of control over one's data, and data misappropriation 18 .…”

“…In contrast, our finding that early career researchers (ECRs) tend to experience more costs than their senior colleagues aligns with concerns expressed by others 27 . The few studies having examined the effect of age and seniority on data sharing attitudes report that, while younger researchers think more favorably about data sharing and reuse 32,33 , ECRs tend to be more fearful and reluctant to share their data than senior researchers 18,26,32,33 (but see 11 ). The most prevailing costs experienced by PIs of all genders and career stages were related to data misuse or misinterpretation; only one respondent reported experiencing reputational damage from errors being identified in their work ( Fig 1C).…”