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o-bib. Das offene Bibliotheksjournal / Herausgeber VDB, Bd. 10 Nr. 1 (2023)

Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awareness might have raised the sharing of research data in empirical articles. To test this idea, we coded N = 1242 publications from five educational psychology journals and the psychological journal Cognition (as a baseline) published in 2018 and 2020. Research data availability was low (3.85% compared to 62.74% in Cognition) but has increased from 0.32% (2018) to 7.16% (2020). However, neither the data transparency level of the journal nor the existence of an official research data policy on the level of the corresponding author's institution was related to research data availability. We discuss the consequences of these findings for institutional research data management processes.

Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awareness might have raised the availability of research data in empirical articles. To test this idea, we coded N = 1172 publications from five educational psychology journals (including educational psychology) and the psychological journal Cognition (as a baseline) published in 2018 and 2020. Only about 4% of the empirical articles in the educational psychology journals shared their research data. Indeed, research data availability increased between 2018 and 2020 at the relatively low level. However, neither the data transparency level of the journal nor the existence of an official research data policy on the level of the corresponding author's institution was related to research data availability. We discuss the consequences of these findings for institutional research data management processes.

The FAIR principles formulate guidelines for the sustainable reusability of research data. FAIR stands for Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of data and metadata. While there is a growing body of general implementation guidelines, so far there is a lack of specific recommendations on how to apply the FAIR principles to the specific needs of social, behavioural and economic science data. These disciplines work with highly diverse data types that often contain confidential information on individuals, companies, or institutions. These features pose some challenges to the useful implementation of the FAIR principles - especially regarding the machine-actionability of data and metadata that is at the core of the FAIR principles. This White Paper defines the FAIR principles for the social, behavioural and economic sciences. For each of the 15 FAIR (sub)principles, the paper proposes minimum requirements and provides a vision for a full-implementation of the FAIR principles by repositories and data centres. The paper was authored by members of the Economic and Social Sciences goINg FAIR Implementation Network (EcoSoc-IN) and addresses research data centres and other stakeholders who strive for a FAIR research data infrastructure in the disciplines of KonsortSWD.