Berends has reasons to be proud these days. After receiving the good news last month that his project on mission-oriented innovation is receiving funding from the NWO, the same institute is now rewarding him with an additional grant for his OPEN QUAL project. Through this project, together with his team members Fleur Deken and Philipp Tuertscher, he hopes to gain new insights into the reuse of existing qualitative data from other researchers and thereby realizing open science principles in a research approach where this has been very difficult until now.
The idea arose when he was chair of the steering committee of the VU Open Science program and noticed that he had difficulty applying open science principles in his own qualitative management research. "For example, if you have a case study of the Philips company with many interviews, where the names of both the CEO and the coffee lady are registered, you can't share those interviews, because there are legal and ethical concerns attached to revealing the names of the participants. On the one hand this has to do with the AVG (privacy legislation), but on the other hand also with agreements on data confidentiality that were made in the past between the researcher and the organizations. And anonymization of data is not an option in this case because context and coherence would then also be lost," says Berends. And that, he says, makes it difficult to meet the expectations of funders and policymakers - to make data as public as possible.
Alternative
Fleur Deken, one of the co-initiators of OPEN QUAL, emphasizes that the type of research she and her colleagues do often consists of embedded and ethnographic research, with scientists usually collecting data from one organization for two or three years. Deken: "That takes an enormous amount of time and resources. It would be a shame if that data is only used once."
The method, which she is developing together with Berends and Tuertscher, focuses on the reuse of data without sharing raw data. The prerequisite is that there is then a common research question. A core group of researchers then draws up a protocol on how the original data can be reanalyzed by the original researchers. "The idea is to look at the same data again with a different perspective."
In the process, Deken explains, it can also foster creativity among researchers. "In our top journals, we find great examples of authors who discovered by chance that they had collected useful data on similar topics in various organizations. Very nice papers have come out of that."
DANS and FAIR data
"Ultimately, this is all an experiment in which, through collaborations, scientists and case studies are brought back together to produce richer and more innovative insights," Berends says. One such partnership is with DANS, the center of excellence for research data. The goal is to work with them to build a broader platform to increase the findability of datasets. In addition, OPEN QUAL is an addition to the current methodology of FAIR data. Berends: "FAIR stands for findable, accessable, interoperable and reusable. With us, reusable data is central. It is an experiment. We have a large network of international researchers who are interested in this. How it will work out in practice, we don't know yet. The goal is to formulate methodological principles based on the joint experiments."
In any case, Deken is positive about the five-year project : "It would not only be nice if we could get more research out of the existing data, but also if, in the context of the development of open science, we think about how our field of business and organizational sciences can make more progress. This could be a good first step."