Acting in the Best Interest of the Other: An Ethics of Care in Digital Curation

Open MIND · 2026-02-17

This study explores how digital repositories approach qualitative research data curation through an ethics of care lens, particularly when handling data containing identifiable participants. Through 44 semi-structured interviews with educational researchers and teacher-educators who produce and reuse video records of practice (VROP), the research examines perceptions of care in repository practices and the relationships between repositories and their designated communities. Our findings indicate that (1) data producers and reusers in education view repositories as sites of care, (2) they view data curation as a form of care, and (3) they expect repositories to act in the best interest of the participants represented in research data, thereby enacting an ethics of care. Interviewees emphasized that repositories must extend beyond technical compliance to embrace ethical commitments that preserve participant dignity throughout the data lifecycle. They sought repositories whose values aligned with their own ethics of care, particularly regarding protection of vulnerable populations. The study identifies care as both a relational process that develops over time and a framework that should inform repository policies from data selection through access decisions. These findings extend current understanding of designated communities beyond consumers of data to include groups whose ethical frameworks should inform repository practices, with implications for qualitative data repositories containing data with identifiable participants.

Acting in the Best Interest of the Other: An Ethics of Care in Digital Curation

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-17

This study explores how digital repositories approach qualitative research data curation through an ethics of care lens, particularly when handling data containing identifiable participants. Through 44 semi-structured interviews with educational researchers and teacher-educators who produce and reuse video records of practice (VROP), the research examines perceptions of care in repository practices and the relationships between repositories and their designated communities. Our findings indicate that (1) data producers and reusers in education view repositories as sites of care, (2) they view data curation as a form of care, and (3) they expect repositories to act in the best interest of the participants represented in research data, thereby enacting an ethics of care. Interviewees emphasized that repositories must extend beyond technical compliance to embrace ethical commitments that preserve participant dignity throughout the data lifecycle. They sought repositories whose values aligned with their own ethics of care, particularly regarding protection of vulnerable populations. The study identifies care as both a relational process that develops over time and a framework that should inform repository policies from data selection through access decisions. These findings extend current understanding of designated communities beyond consumers of data to include groups whose ethical frameworks should inform repository practices, with implications for qualitative data repositories containing data with identifiable participants.

Embracing Chaos Again: Tracing Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Knowledge Workers’ Data Practices for Collaborative Public Health Crisis Response

2026-04-13 · 1 citations

As knowledge workers, university personnel's data partnerships with government entities represent an emerging mode of collaboration for public health crisis response. However, little is known about how such collaborations unfold in non-routine, complex settings. This paper investigates a data partnership between a university research team and a state health department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 15 interviews with university personnel, we analyzed their data practices using boundary negotiating artifacts (BNA) theory, identifying five key challenges and related artifacts. We found that the absence or breakdown of artifacts pushed university personnel toward ad hoc workarounds, while power dynamics complicated artifact creation and use. Consequently, collaboration relied more on broader sociotechnical arrangements than on artifacts themselves. These insights both enrich BNA theory's defining features of non-routine, complex collaborations and point to design opportunities for supporting knowledge workers engaged in crisis-driven data partnerships, which are often politically charged.

Valuing curation infrastructures

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2025-08-13 · 2 citations

Abstract This study uses a theoretical lens of infrastructural dimensions to examine stakeholders' perceptions of the value of curation, focusing on the social science data repository, the Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Drawing on 67 interviews with both internal (ICPSR staff) and external (funders, data producers, and reusers) stakeholders, we analyze how value is ascribed to curation across technical, organizational, and social components of infrastructure. We identify five key ways interviewees conceptualized the value of curation infrastructures: supporting sustainability and durability, enabling research efficiency, fostering trust, building community, and advancing data equity. Our findings highlight the role of curation in knowledge generation by reframing curation as infrastructure rather than a set of discrete practices. We clarify how transparency operates in dual—and sometimes conflicting—ways: as both understandability and invisibility, shaping trust in and access to data repositories. Second, we demonstrate how data equity is increasingly perceived by stakeholders as a core infrastructural value, enacted through practices that lower barriers to access. Finally, we surface the persistent challenges in evaluating and funding curation infrastructures due to their long time horizons and often‐invisible nature. This work advocates recognizing and funding curation infrastructures as essential for long‐term scientific and societal progress.

Going the Distance: Achieving Sufficiency in Data Reuse

Harvard Data Science Review · 2025-04-30

Now Is the Time to Strengthen Government-Academic Data Infrastructures to Jump-Start Future Public Health Crisis Response

JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2024-03-05 · 9 citations

During public health crises, the significance of rapid data sharing cannot be overstated. In attempts to accelerate COVID-19 pandemic responses, discussions within society and scholarly research have focused on data sharing among health care providers, across government departments at different levels, and on an international scale. A lesser-addressed yet equally important approach to sharing data during the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises involves cross-sector collaboration between government entities and academic researchers. Specifically, this refers to dedicated projects in which a government entity shares public health data with an academic research team for data analysis to receive data insights to inform policy. In this viewpoint, we identify and outline documented data sharing challenges in the context of COVID-19 and other public health crises, as well as broader crisis scenarios encompassing natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies. We then argue that government-academic data collaborations have the potential to alleviate these challenges, which should place them at the forefront of future research attention. In particular, for researchers, data collaborations with government entities should be considered part of the social infrastructure that bolsters their research efforts toward public health crisis response. Looking ahead, we propose a shift from ad hoc, intermittent collaborations to cultivating robust and enduring partnerships. Thus, we need to move beyond viewing government-academic data interactions as 1-time sharing events. Additionally, given the scarcity of scholarly exploration in this domain, we advocate for further investigation into the real-world practices and experiences related to sharing data from government sources with researchers during public health crises.

More Than Just a Vision: Confronting the Practical Barriers in Fostering Sustainable Government-Academic Data Infrastructures (Preprint)

2024-09-25

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Authors’ Reply to: Strengthening the Backbone: Government-Academic Data Collaborations for Crisis Response

JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2024-10-02

An empirical examination of data reuser trust in a digital repository

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2024-06-20 · 6 citations

Abstract Most studies of trusted digital repositories have focused on the internal factors delineated in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model—organizational structure, technical infrastructure, and policies, procedures, and processes. Typically, these factors are used during an audit and certification process to demonstrate a repository can be trusted. The factors influencing a repository's designated community of users to trust it remains largely unexplored. This article proposes and tests a model of trust in a data repository and the influence trust has on users' intention to continue using it. Based on analysis of 245 surveys from quantitative social scientists who published research based on the holdings of one data repository, findings show three factors are positively related to data reuser trust—integrity, identification, and structural assurance. In turn, trust and performance expectancy are positively related to data reusers' intentions to return to the repository for more data. As one of the first studies of its kind, it shows the conceptualization of trusted digital repositories needs to go beyond high‐level definitions and simple application of the OAIS standard. Trust needs to encompass the complex trust relationship between designated communities of users that the repositories are being built to serve.

Now Is the Time to Strengthen Government-Academic Data Infrastructures to Jump-Start Future Public Health Crisis Response (Preprint)

2023-10-27

<sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> During public health crises, the significance of rapid data sharing cannot be overstated. In attempts to accelerate COVID-19 pandemic responses, discussions within society and scholarly research have focused on data sharing among health care providers, across government departments at different levels, and on an international scale. A lesser-addressed yet equally important approach to sharing data during the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises involves cross-sector collaboration between government entities and academic researchers. Specifically, this refers to dedicated projects in which a government entity shares public health data with an academic research team for data analysis to receive data insights to inform policy. In this viewpoint, we identify and outline documented data sharing challenges in the context of COVID-19 and other public health crises, as well as broader crisis scenarios encompassing natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies. We then argue that government-academic data collaborations have the potential to alleviate these challenges, which should place them at the forefront of future research attention. In particular, for researchers, data collaborations with government entities should be considered part of the social infrastructure that bolsters their research efforts toward public health crisis response. Looking ahead, we propose a shift from ad hoc, intermittent collaborations to cultivating robust and enduring partnerships. Thus, we need to move beyond viewing government-academic data interactions as 1-time sharing events. Additionally, given the scarcity of scholarly exploration in this domain, we advocate for further investigation into the real-world practices and experiences related to sharing data from government sources with researchers during public health crises. </sec>