Ready-made or tailor-made? Seeking seamless depositing solutions for multi (LMIC) country qualitative data

The NIHR-RESPIRE collaboration spans across four South Asian, low-middle income countries (LMICs) of Bangladesh, India, Malaysia and Pakistan, and hosted by the University of Edinburgh.  One of the deliverables of RESPIRE is to deposit and share research data in an open-source repository.  We explored if all RESPIRE data could be deposited into one open repository.  Our methodology was organic but included: retrospective review of all RESPIRE projects’ proposals and/or protocols; remote and face-to-face discussions with the RESPIRE research project teams about data management, and ready-made data depositing solutions including repositories at the University of Edinburgh. We piloted both quantitative and qualitative data submissions into a preferred open repository: Edinburgh DataShare. Quantitative data is relatively straightforward in being de-identified and can be made available in open repositories, but qualitative data is more challenging.  The data from a RESPIRE PhD project highlighted that raw qualitative data could not be deposited openly due to the sensitive nature of the data and current lack of guidance on de-identification of raw data such as images. Other raw data include original audio recordings, verbatim and translated transcripts.  Similarly, discussions at the RESPIRE annual scientific meeting highlighted that qualitative data presented this challenge across all RESPIRE partners.