Research with open data
What is open data?
Open data is data that is collected by researchers and published free of charge in order to make the knowledge available to others and enable them to conduct research. Such open data is often accessible in so-called repositories: two examples of this at the University of Vienna are Phaidra and the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).
What is the added value of working with open data?
It gives you the opportunity to work with existing, quality-assured data sets in your project (e.g. your thesis) that you might not be able to collect yourself in this form, e.g. representative data for entire population groups. In addition, you can save time during data collection, which is then available for a more in-depth analysis and interpretation of the data.
What does Open Science mean?
Open data, or research with open data, is part of the open science movement. Open science means that scientific data is made available to the general public. In the spirit of open science, the aim is to ensure that knowledge is made as widely accessible as possible and that new knowledge can be created.
The video on the right (in German) explains what Open Science brings to each and every one of us.
What do I need to bear in mind when working with open data?
The data sets were not collected for your specific research question, which means you will need to invest time to "get to know" the dataset and decide which part of this dataset is suitable for answering your research question(s). Talk to your supervisor about the best way to go about this.
If you have questions about working with open data, come to the CTL's methods camp and discuss questions about qualitative and quantitative data in groups and with CTL student employees!
Resources
Information on Open Science at the University of Vienna:
- Open Access Office - Contact point for Open Access
- Phaidra - The repository for data at the University of Vienna, from the archive of the Institute of Astrohysics to botanical wall charts and the Virtual Archive of Logical Empiricism
- AUSSDA - The Social Science Data Archive
- Open Science Support - Further services of the University Library and contact persons on the subject of Open Science
- Data Center at the Department of Sociology (University of Vienna)
Information on the topics "Legally secure research" and "Legally secure publishing"
- Information and advice on research data management
- Contact for questions about data management at the University of Vienna: rdm@univie.ac.at
- MOOC "Legally secure research" (in German)
- MOOC "Publishing legally secure" (in German)
- Info page Office StudienPräses: Data protection in the social sciences (in German)
Further links:
- Platform for theses of the City of Vienna: On this page you will find suggestions for innovative and practice-oriented topics from the City of Vienna and you can also suggest topics for a thesis yourself (in German)
- Berlin Declaration on Open Science
- Online-Kurs der Universität Konstanz über Open Science