Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Sharing data on social media - dos and don'ts

Sharing data on social media - dos and don'ts

Regardless of where you share your data, the same legal and privacy concerns listed at "Phase 3: Producing Open content" and "Phase 4: Preparing data, resources, research outputs for publication" are to be kept in mind and to adhere to. For instance, if you share your data under a CC-BY 4.0. license, the same reuse conditions apply everywhere, regardless of whether you publish them through a trusted repository or Wikidata, on a random website on the Internet, on social media or you land it to someone on a USB stick. However, in chapter 4.2 Where to store and publish my research outputs , we saw that in terms of findability, accessibility and sustainability, selecting a publication venue has enormous consequences. In a similar vein, this section, we touch upon possible ethical implications in selecting a publication venue for your data or other scholarly content, with special focus on social media.

Sharing your work on social media is repeatedly suggested in advocacy workshops addressing especially early career researchers to make a bigger research and societal impact, improve the outreach of their work and gain more recognition. Below you can find pointers and checklists that will help you to do that in a sustainable and fair manner.

1. Check the basics

- Are you the copyright holder of the materials to be shared? If not (because it is owned by your institution or another 3rd party), is the license allow for open sharing? 
- Are all the legal, GDPR-related and ethical barriers listed above in Phase 4 sorted out? 

2. Ownership is crucial: use de-centralised and community-controlled platforms over proprietary black boxes

Recently, the change in ownership and curation policies of Twitter and the associated global issues and controversies eloquently showcased how much a critical mass of users, including scholarly communities, are exposed to such proprietary platforms and urged societies at large to look for more transparent, more community-controlled, fairer alternatives. The fedigov movement (collective?) raises awareness of these issues in an easily accessible manner and offers more sustainable alternatives to the most commonly used social media platforms.

3. Linking instead of copying

The most sustainable way of sharing your work on social media is simply to link its Persistent Identifier or Wikidata ID/link instead of republishing. This allows you to keep versioning clear and even to track its citation and usage metrics.

4. How about academic social media platforms?

The popularity of platforms like Research Gate and Academia.eu seem to be steady over the years, contrary to the fact that the same ownership and intransparency issues define their operation as we saw with Twitter. This blog post explains it all and gives you ideas for alternatives. As an addition to the latter, we recommend to discover Scholia, a scholarly discovery service that creates visual scholarly profiles for topics, people, organizations, species, chemicals, etc using bibliographic and other information in Wikidata.

5. Academic blogs

Solid evidence suggests that blogging about your research does not only make your work (ongoing work in many cases) easily accessible to audiences of different kinds but it also improves your academic writing. The Hypotheses platform offers blogs spaces freely for academics and brings them together in a catalogue broken down to languages and topics.