Publications

This reflection piece seeks to tackle this blurriness and advance the concept’s analytical precision by presenting and discussing transparency’s main dimensions, as well as its framing within the scholarly body of good governance, democracy, and development. To do so, the reflection paper presents a novel approach; to define transparency in the form of a function (which places transparency in relation to, and as a function) of its two constituting dimensions: a) information (timely and qualitative), and b) accountability mechanisms (namely, a free media environment and legitimate accountability channels).

Increasingly, researchers are expected to make their research data openly available. However, scientific fields differ in their research practices and norms for sharing research data. We provide quantitative evidence of differences in data practices and the public sharing of research data at a granularity of field-specificity that is rarely reported in open data surveys. Based on a survey of 8,822 researchers at German Universities, we find considerable variation, within and across disciplines, of data practices and rates of open data sharing. Our findings underline that in order to evaluate rates of public data sharing, a better understanding of the embedding of public data sharing into field-specific research practices is needed.