open data

A (non-viral) copyleft/sharealike license for open research data

by Felix Schönbrodt & Roland Ramthun

The open availability of scientific material (such as research data, code, or other material) has often been identified as one cornerstone of a trustworthy, reproducible, and verifiable science. At the same time, the actual availability of such reproducible material still is scarce (though on the rise).

To increase the availability of open scientific material, we propose a license for scientific research data that increases the availability of other open scientific material. It borrows a mechanism from open source software development: The application of copyleft (or, in the CC terminology, “sharealike”) licenses. These are so-called “sticky licenses”, because they require that every reuse of the licensed material has to have the same license. This means, if you reuse material under this license, your own product/derivative must also (a) be freely reusable and (b) use that license, so that any derivative from your product is free as well, ad infinitum.

The promise of such a “viral” license is that it can induce more and more freedom into a system. It is supposed to be a strategy to reform the environment: The more artifacts have a copyleft license, the more likely it is that future products have the same license, until, at the end, everything is free.

Picture of a viral license by Phoebus87 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Symian_virus.png)

One criticism of such licenses stems from the definition of “freedom”: According to this point of view, the highest degree of freedom is if you can do anything with a material. This also includes commercial usage, which is usually closed for competitive reasons, or to integrate the material into a larger dataset which itself can not be open, because other parts of the data have restrictive licenses. We are not lawyers, but in our understanding this could, for example, also include restrictions due to privacy rights.

For example, imagine the compilation of an integrative database that includes both material from a copyleft source and another source that has individual-related material, which cannot be openly shared due to privacy rights (but could be shared as a restricted scientific use file). At least from our understanding, a strict copyleft license would preclude the reuse in such a restricted way. Hence, the copyleft license, although claiming to ensure freedom, does preclude a lot of potential reuse scenarios. From this point of view, a so-called permissive license (such as CC0, MIT, or BSD) provides more freedom than a copyleft license (see, e.g., The Whys and Hows of Licensing Scientific Code).

We propose a system that addresses both points of view, with the goal to provide some stickiness of scientific open sharing, but also the possibility to operate with scientific material that require restrictiveness, for example due to privacy rights.

The proposed copyleft license for open data: Open data requires open analysis code.

We suggest the following clause for the reuse of open research data:

Upon publication of any scientific work under a broad definition (including, but not limited to journal papers, books or book chapters, conference proceedings, blog posts) that is based in full or in part on this data set, all data analysis scripts involved in the creation of this work must be made openly available under a license that allows reuse (e.g., BSD or MIT).

(Of course more topics must be addressed in the license, such as the obligation to properly cite the authors of the data set, not to try to reidentify research participants, etc. But we focus only on the copyleft aspect here).

This system has some differences from traditional copyleft licenses.

  • First, usually the reuser has to share any derivative, which often is the same category as the open material (typically: you reuse a piece of software, and have to share your own software product under an open license). In this proposal, you reuse open data, and have to share open analysis code. Hence, you support the openness of a community in another currency. Without the need to publish derived data sets, integration scenarios of usually incompatible, open and closed data become possible.
  • Second, it restricts the copyleft property to a certain type of reuse, namely the creation of scientific work. This ensures, on the one hand, that open knowledge grows and scientific claims are verifiable to a larger extent than before. On the other hand, commercial reuse is enabled; furthermore there might be non-scientific reuse scenarios that do not involve analysis code, where the clause is not applicable anyway. Finally, even the most restrictive data set (where you have to go to a repository operator and analyze the data on dedicated computers in a secure room) can generate open derivatives.
  • Third, the license is not sticky: The published open analysis code itself does not require a copyleft when it is reused. Instead it has a permissive license.

Against the “research parasite” argument

The proposed system offers some protection against the “research parasites” argument. The parasite discussion refers to the free-rider problem in social dilemmas: While some people invest resources to provide a public good, others (the parasites/free-riders) profit from the public good, without giving back to the community (see also Linek et al., 2017). This often creates a feeling of injustice, and impulses to punish the free-riders. (An entire scientific field is devoted to the structural, sociological, political, and psychological properties and consequences of such social dilemma structures.)

In the proposed licensing system, those who profit from openness by reusing open data must give something back to the community. This increases overall openness, reusability, and reproducibility of scientific outputs, and probably decreases feelings of exploitation and unfairness for the data providers.

Do you think such a license would work? Do you see any drawbacks we didn’t think of?

You can leave feedback here as a comment, on Twitter (@nicebread303) or via email to felix@nicebread.de.

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German Psychological Society fully embraces open data, gives detailed recommendations

tl;dr: The German Psychological Society developed and adopted new recommendations for data sharing that fully embrace openness, transparency and scientific integrity. Key message is that raw data are an essential part of an empirical publication and must be openly shared. The recommendations also give very practical advice on how to implement these values, such as “When should data providers be asked to be co-authors in a data reuse project?” and “How to deal with participant privacy?”.

In the last year, the discussion in our field moved from “Do we have a replication crisis?” towards “Yes, we have a problem, and what can and should we change? How can be implement it?”. I think that we need both top-down changes on an institutional level, combined with bottom-up approaches, such as local Open Science Initiatives. Here, I want to present one big institutional change concerning open data.

Funders Start Requiring Open Data: Recommendations for Psychology

The German Research Foundation (DFG), the largest public funder of research in Germany, updated their policy on data sharing, which can be summarized in a single sentence: Publicly funded research, including the raw data, belongs to the public. Consequently, all research data from a DFG funded project should be made open immediately, or at least a couple of months after finalization of the research project (see [1] and [2]). Furthermore, the DFG asked all scientific disciplines to develop more specific guidelines which implement these principles in their respective discipline.

The German Psychological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie, DGPs) installed a working group (Andrea Abele-Brehm, Mario Gollwitzer and me) who worked for one year on such recommendations for psychology.

In the development of the document, we tried to be very inclusive and to harvest the wisdom of the crowd. A first draft (Feb 2016) was discussed for 6 weeks in an internet forum where all DGPs members could comment. Based on this discussion (and many additional personal conversations), a revised version was circulated and discussed in person with a smaller group of interested members (July 2016) and a representative of the DFG. Furthermore, we had regular contact to the “Fachkollegium Psychologie” of the DFG (i.e., the group of people which decides about funding decisions in psychology; meanwhile, the members of the Fachkollegium have changed on a rotational basis). Finally, the chair persons of all sections of the DGPs and the speakers of the young members had another possibility to comment. On September 17, the recommendations were officially adopted by the society.

I think this thorough and iterative process was very important for two reasons: First, it definitely improved the quality of the document, because we got so many great ideas and comments from the members, ironing out some inconsistencies and covering some edge cases. Second, it was important in order to get people on board. As this new open data guideline of the DFG causes a major change in the way we do our everyday scientific work, we wanted to talk to and convince as many people as possible from the early steps on. Of course not every single of the >4,000 members is equally convinced, but the topic now has considerable attention in the society.

Hence, one focus was consensus and inclusivity. At the same time, we had the goal to develop bold and forward-looking guidelines that really address the current challenges of the field, and not to settle on the lowest common denominator. For this goal, we had to find a balance between several, sometimes conflicting, values.

A Fine Balance of Values

Research transparency ⬌ privacy rights. A first specialty of psychology is that we do not investigate rocks or electrons, but human subjects who have privacy rights. In a nutshell, privacy rights have to be respected, and in case of doubt they win over openness. But if data can be properly anonymized, there’s no problem in open sharing; one possibility to share non-anonymous research data are “scientific use files”, where access is restricted to scientists. If data cannot be shared due to privacy (or other) reasons, this has to be made transparent in the paper. (Hence, the recommendations are PRO compatible). The recommendations give clear guidance on privacy issues and gives practical advice, for example, on how to write your informed consent that you actually are able to share the data afterwards.

Data reuse ⬌ right of first usage. A second balance concerns an optimal reuse of data on the one hand, and the right of first usage of the original authors. In the discussion phase during the development of the recommendations, several people expressed the fear of “research parasites”, who “steal” the data from hard-working scientists. A very common gut feeling is: “The data belong to me”. But, as we are publicly funded researchers with publicly funded research projects, the answer is quite clear: the data belong to the public. There is no copyright on raw data. On the other hand, we also need incentives for original researchers to generate data in the first place. Data generators of course have the right of first usage, and the recommendations allow to extend this right by an embargo of 5 more years (see below). But at the end of the day, publicly funded research data belongs to the public, and everybody can reuse it. If data are open by default, a guideline also must discuss and define how data reuse should be handled. Our recommendations make suggestions in which cases a co-authorship should be offered to the data providers and in which cases this is not necessary.

Verification ⬌ fair treatment of original authors. Finally, research should be verifiable, but with a fair treatment of the original authors. The guidelines say that whenever a reanalysis of a data set is going to be published (and that also includes blog posts or presentations), the original authors have to be informed about this. They cannot prevent the reanalysis, but they have the chance to react to it.

Two types of data sharing

We distinguish two types of data sharing:

Type 1 data sharing means that all raw data should be openly shared that is necessary to reproduce the results reported in a paper. Hence, this can be only a subset of all available variables in the full data set: The subset which is needed to reproduce these specific results. The primary data are an essential part of an empirical publication, and a paper without that simply is not complete.

Type 2 data sharing refers to the release of the full data set of a funded research project. The DGPs recommendations claim that after the end of a DFG-funded
project all data – even data which has not yet been used for publications – should be made open. Unpublished null results, or additional, exploratory variables now have to chance to see the light and to be reused by other researchers. Experience tells that not all planned papers have been written after the official end date of a project. Therefore, the recommendations allow that the right of first usage can be extended with an embargo period of up to 5 years, where the (so far unpublished) data do not have to be made public. The embargo option only applies to data that has not yet been used for publications. Hence, typically an embargo cannot be applied to Type 1 data sharing.

Summary & the Next Steps

To summarize, I think these recommendations are the most complete, practical, and specific guidelines for data sharing in psychology to date. (Of course much more details are in the recommendations themselves). They fully embrace openness, transparency and scientific integrity. Furthermore, they do not proclaim detached ethical principles, but give very practical guidance on how to actually implement data sharing in psychology.

What are the next steps? The president of the DGPs, Prof. Conny Antoni, and the secretary Prof. Mario Gollwitzer already contacted other psychological societies (APA, APS, EAPP, EASP, EFPA, SIPS, SESP, SPSP) and introduced our recommendations. The Board of Scientific Affairs of EFPA – the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations – already expressed its appreciation of the recommendations and will post them on their website. Furthermore, it will discuss them in an invited symposium on the European Congress of Psychology in Amsterdam this year. A mid-term goal will also be to check compatibility with existing other guidelines and to think about a harmonization of several guidelines within psychology.

As other scientific disciplines in Germany also work on their specific implementations of the DFG guidelines, it will be interesting to see whether there are common lines (although there certainly will be persisting and necessary differences between the requirements of the fields). Finally, we are in contact with the new Fachkollegium at the DFG, with the goal to see how the recommendations can and should be used in the process of funding decisions.

If your field also implements such recommendations/guidelines, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Download the Recommendations

Schönbrodt, F., Gollwitzer, M., & Abele-Brehm, A. (2017). Der Umgang mit Forschungsdaten im Fach Psychologie: Konkretisierung der DFG-Leitlinien. Psychologische Rundschau, 68, 20–35. doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000341. [PDF German][PDF English]

(English translation by Malte Elson, Johannes Breuer, and Zoe Magraw-Mickelson)

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