Is there a social life in Open Data? Open datasets exploring practices in Educational Technology Research

In the landscape of Open Science, Open Data [OD] plays a crucial role as data are one of the most basic components of research despite their diverse formats across scientific disciplines. Opening up data is a recent concern for policy makers and researchers as the basis for good open science practices. The common factor underlying these new practices – the relevance of promoting open data circulation and reuse – is mostly a social form of knowledge sharing and construction. However, while data sharing is being strongly promoted by policy making and is becoming a frequent practice in some disciplinary fields, open data sharing is much less developed in social sciences and in educational research.

The Open Data hereby introduced is composed of two integrated datasets which collect data relating practices of Open Data publication and sharing in the field of Educational Thecnologies. This data was collected to suport the aim of investigating open data sharing in a selection of open data repositories as well as in the academic social network site ResearchGate.

The research questions addressing this study are:

1. Do researchers in the field of Educational Technology publish Open Datasets [ODs]?
2. To which extent are ODs compliant with the FAIR data principles?
3. What is the social life relating to the ODs in terms of the metrics provided by the OD portals? As a subsidiary question: 3.a- To what extent do open data portals allow researchers to cultivate social practices around OD?

In order to investigate OD presence in ResearchGate, the following research aim guided the second part of the study: Analysis of the presence of the same selected OD in ResearchGate and of the type of social activity OD exhibited by OD according to ResearchGate mètrics.

The Open Data here presented is composed by two datasets.

1. 23 datasets extracted out from 82 randomly selected datasets, from an inital total of 633. The data set presents a Codebook explaining the several categories of analysis or variables and the values assigned to the same. Since the analysis was performed in two phases (first selection and screening, second selection and classification) the codebook is divided in two tables. Moreover, the data set contains 6 Worksheets, ordered taking the workflow as reference: Codebook, Dataset_Extraction, Analysis_Workflow, Selected_Analysis. This dataset has been produced and curated by J.E.Raffaghelli
2. The analysis of correspondance for the 23 datasets in ResearchGate. The data set presents a Codebook, and is divided into two worksheets: Codebook, ODT&RG. The last worksheet introduces the comparison between the social mètrics within RG of the found datasets and the relating papers. This dataset has been produced and curated by S. Manca and J.E. Raffaghelli.