Opening up and Sharing Data from Qualitative Research: A Primer

The call for free access to research data and materials is becoming louder and louder from the political and scientific communities in Germany. More and more researchers are facing demands to open up qualitative research data for scientific purposes. They often have a general interest in sharing their data, but are unsure how to proceed. This handout was developed to provide an initial introduction to opening and sharing qualitative data. It was developed at a workshop held in Berlin in January 2020, organized by the research group „Digitization of Science“ of the Weizenbaum Institute, together with its associate researcher Dr. Isabel Steinhardt from the University of Kassel. The workshop involved staff from German research data centers as well as mentees and mentors from the Fellow Program Open Science who already have experience with Open Science, qualitative research, and interdisciplinary research. The handout is addressed primarily to qualitatively researching scientists in Germany. For this reason, it was initially written in German. One year later, we have now decided to translate the handout into English as well. The reasons are twofold: first, we want to make it accessible to researchers in Germany with little knowledge of German. Second, we also want to give interested people outside Germany an insight into the German system and the German discussion about opening up and sharing qualitative data. Due to the objectives and the history of its development, the handout focuses on the German context. This includes the literature references and further sources, and the references to research data centers as well as legal issues. We have deliberately not included a contextualization of the German situation in international discussions in order to keep the handout as short as possible.