Project proposal Bright Minds Assistantships February 2022
Open data and the global South: opportunity or threat?
Department: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Research group: Innovation Studies
Supervisor: Koen Beumer & Jarno Hoekman
Email address: k.beumer@uu.nl & j.hoekman@uu.nl
Project description
This Bright Minds Assistantship aims to understand the impact of open data for sustainability on global inequalities in the production of scientific knowledge.
Open data refers to the practice to make publicly available the data used for scientific publications. This data can then be used by public stakeholders to check scientific conclusion or analyse the raw data for themselves, or by other scientists to analyse the data in different ways.
Open data is one of the key elements of open science: the movement to make scientific research widely accessible to society. The open science movement is gathering steam around the world, often fueled by indignation that publicly funded science is locked away behind paywalls of private publishing companies.
Internationally, organizations like UNESCO and the European Union are implementing open science policies, and at the local level the Utrecht Open Science Community is actively pursuing open science.
Openness and transparency are core principles in scientific knowledge production. Yet we know very little about the distributional effects that open data may have on the science system. In fact, an hypotheses can be put forward that open data deepens global inequalities in the production of scientific knowledge:
whereas open data in principle enables anyone to use the data to produce new scientific publications, in practice this depends on the capacity to absorb and use that data – capacity that may be more readily available in rich countries than in poor countries. The result could be that data that is made available by researchers in poor countries, is quickly used by researchers in rich countries, while researchers in poor countries are not able to use data that is made available by rich countries.
In this Bright Minds Assistantship, you will empirically test whether open data alleviate or increase inequalities in the production of scientific knowledge. You will use publication databases such as Web of Science to collect publications that have made their data publicly available, categorize those based as publications from rich and poor countries based on authorship affiliation, and trace whether articles that have subsequently made use of those open data are from rich or poor countries. You will also contribute to discussions on research design, statistical modelling and interpretation of observed patterns in an international research team. As the project will work according to Open Science principles, you will gain valuable experience in the joint study and utilization of Open Science research practices.
Job requirements
• Genuine interest in science, technology and innovation in the Global South
• General understanding of the value of Open Science research practices
• Proven skills to handle large data sets using R or other programming language
• Affinity with statistical modelling and data visualization
