Data Sharing: A Problem of Supply or of Demand?

On October 25 at 2PM, Prof. Christine Borgman from UCLA will be speaking about how the sharing of research data affects scientific practice. Her talk is the Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, Room 2135
Abstract
Knowledge sharing in science includes sharing research data. Research funding agencies have focused on increasing the supply of data by requiring data management plans and data sharing. Policy makers have paid surprisingly little attention to the demand for data. It stands to reason that if scholars actively sought data for reuse, then more data would be shared. The few studies that exist on the demand for extant data suggest that researchers rarely are asked for their data and rarely seek data from other investigators. Many investigators have difficulty imagining who might want their data or for what purposes they might be useful. The talk will explore the supply and demand for scientific data reuse, drawing on studies in astronomy and sensor networks, and will discuss implications for science policy.

About the Speaker
Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. In 2012-13 she was on sabbatical at the University of Oxford where she was the Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Balliol College, and also affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute and the eResearch Centre. Prof. Borgman is the author of more than 200 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. Her monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (MIT Press, 2007) and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000), each won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She conducts data practices research with funding from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, and Microsoft Research. Current collaborations include Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory, The Transformation of Knowledge, Culture, and Practice in Data-Driven Science, and Empowering Long Tail Research. Her next book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2014.

This event is co-sponsored by the “Machines, People, and Politics” RFG and the Center for Information Technology and Society