Session Title: Data Sharing in a Development Context: The experience of the IDRC Data Sharing Pilot

Session Organisers: Cameron Neylon

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Session Description:

The International Development Research Center (IDRC) Data Sharing Pilot is a project to refine guidelines for the implementation of development research funders’ open research data policies and to inform IDRC on the design and implementation of its Data Management and Sharing policy. The Pilot, which started in October 2015 is conducting open data case studies with eight IDRC grantees to develop and implement open data management and sharing plans. The case studies examine the scale of legal, ethical and technical challenges that might limit the sharing of data from IDRC projects including issues of:

• Privacy, personally identifiable information and protection of human subjects
  
• Protection of intellectual property generated from projects or potential for financial risks for projects or institutions
  
• Challenges in the local legal environment, including ownership of data
  
• Ethical issues in releasing or sharing of indigenous and community knowledge, and the relationship between project participants and investigators particularly in the context of historical expropriation of resources
• Local and global issues of capacity and expertise in the management and sharing of data
  

The project is likely to realise useful findings and guidance for the development and implementation of research data policies for funding agencies worldwide.  In particular, the collaborative and co-designed approach with projects playing a significant role in conducting data audits and developing data management plans will be of wider interest. 

The proposed session will explore these dimensions from a broader and genuinely global perspective. The session will provide a background to the motivations for the project and the emerging experience of collaboratively implementing a funder data management policy.

Possible speakers would be as follows:  

• Barbara Porrett, Fernando Perini: IDRC’s objectives and considerations in developing a data policy
• Cameron Neylon, Leslie Chan: the IDRC pilot project, approach and issues arising
• 2-4 project reports: summary of data issues for the project and the benefits and challenges of conducting a  data audit, developing a data management plan.  With particular attention to data challenges (permissions, trust with subjects, indigenous/traditional knowledge, sensitive data of various sorts).

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Papers

This session has 5 papers.

• Data Sharing in a Development Context: The experience of the IDRC Data Sharing Pilot. - Cameron Neylon
• IDRC and Data Sharing: The motivation for a pilot project (Withdrawn) - Barbara Porrett
• HarassMap: Sharing crowdsourced mapping data on sexual harassment - Reem Wael
• Should Data be Shared?: Situated Openness and Struggles over Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge, Climate Change, and Research Contracts in South Africa - Cath Traynor, Laura Foster
• Collecting Tobacco Data From Across Africa: The challenges of data aggregation and sharing - Lynn Woolfrey

Posters

This session has 0 posters.