Research support - Law Library

"Open science is a research practice where processes and results are made openly accessible to the extent possible. This involves opening up methods, processes, source code, software, research data management, and to publish with aims of availability, reuse and reproducibility." Open science

Why share research data?

1. UiO's policy and guidelines follow the “open by default” principle. Research data should be made as accessible as possible and as restricted as necessary.
2. Requirements from funders and publishers may mean that data should be published in accordance with the “open as standard” principle.
3. Sharing research data is beneficial to society. In addition to making your research verifiable, sharing contributes to transparency, democratization, inclusion, increased innovation and trust in research.
4. It is benefiting you! Sharing data can contribute to:

• Increased visibility

• New partners, networking

• More collaborative projects

• Access to more datasets

• Impact

• Building your CV

• Use in teaching

About open research and research data at UiO

Open research - For employees - Universitetet i Oslo

Research data - For employees - Universitetet i Oslo

What is research data in legal research?

In legal doctrinal research, the legal sources are research data, as they are the basic material in the research.

“Research data are representations of observations, objects or other material used as evidence or basic material in research.”

Documents, recordings, registers and other sources become research data when they are used as basic material in research.

What are research data? - For employees - University of Oslo (uio.no)

What is research data in social science research?

There are several ways to define research data in the social sciences. According to UiO's categorization, observational data and source data are the most common types. Observational data are recordings or descriptions of phenomena that are collected using social science methods such as interviews, surveys or observations. Source data is documents, register and archive data, as described in the section above.

Storage and preservation of legal research data 

Research data must be described and stored in an appropriate manner. FAIR is a set of principles designed to ensure this as far as possible. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, in Norwegian often translated to retrievable, accessible, interactable and reusable. The FAIR principles

The legal sources themselves will often be easily accessible to others, and largely in line with the FAIR principles. As a rule of thumb, it is enough to document the location of the legal source you have used. In cases where sources do not have a stable storage location or are difficult to access, it makes sense to store a copy.

Some types of research data indicate that you should consider where you store them, see the Data Storage Guide - University of Oslo.  You should consider where the sources come from before you leave them on your desk etc., for example if you have gained access to material that is not openly available. Another aspect of this is that you should be systematic in storing and retaining files, regardless of the type of data. This facilitates retrieval for your own part, as well as facilitating the process if you need to share something further later.

Archiving and sharing research data for reuse

Research data should be shared as openly as possible, and as closed as necessary.

If you're going to share your research data, make sure there are no legal, ethical or security considerations that prevent you from sharing it. And when conducting research on data containing personal data, you should obtain a good basis for processing from the start. 

Open sharing - For employees - University of Oslo

Considerations before sharing:

•  Is your source material available to others, also outside your institution?
  • If not, you should share them. Unless privacy, copyright, ethical or business collaboration considerations dictate otherwise.
• Have you systematically extracted the same type of information from the legal sources.
  • This can be shared as datasets for further research unless legal or ethical reasons indicate that they should not be shared. Datasets with green data can be divided into, among other things DataverseNO and Open Science Framework (OSF). For more information see: Archiving research data - For employees - University of Oslo
• Do you have observational data, such as interviews? Have you acquired a processing basis that warrants sharing?