In the February 2018 issue of the Comparative Education Review Bjorn Nordtveit, the editor of CER, published an editorial about the challenges of data sharing facing professional journals.
In the article, he reviews the evolution of data sharing policies and practice in recent years, summarizing decisions taken by AERA journals to establish a data repository and their work in drafting related policies. The article describes actions taken by publishers, NSF and the Public Library of Science and ongoing steps related to various kinds of research data.
Particularly relevant for the field of comparative and international education is the issue of access to the data by stakeholders from the South given that data repositories are most likely to be located in the North and are thus more easily accessed by those working in the North.
The article concludes with concerns he has as editor of the CER. Data sharing presents ethical and moral dilemmas as well as putting difficult practical demands on authors preparing research for publication. In his words:
As an editor, I seek for diversity of voices, and I wonder whether these future requirements, which are likely to be adopted by most publishing houses and/or journals, will decrease diversity since it will benefit those with access to more “publishable” data, and those with support in the preparation (cleaning) of data.1
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1Nordtveit, Bjorn (2018). “Data Sharing in Comparative and International Education.” Comparative Education Review, Vol 62 (1), p. 4.