Trust and transparency in science: An ongoing journey - DANS

Trust and transparency in science: An ongoing journey | FAIR-IMPACT Open call for financial support |  A new FAQ! 

Trust and transparency in science: An ongoing journey | FAIR-IMPACT Open call for financial support |  A new FAQ! 

Reflect, Enjoy, Do something! Lessons from the International Digital Curation Conference - GigaBlog

Closing Gaps: A Model of Cumulative Curation and Preservation Levels for Trustworthy Digital Repositories

Curation and preservation measures carried out by digital repository staff are an important building block in maintaining the accessibility and usability of digital resources over time. The measures adequate to achieve long-term usability for a given audience strongly depend on scenarios of (re)use, the (intended) users’ needs and skills, the organisational setting (e.g., mission, resources, policies), as well as the characteristics of the digital objects to be preserved. The assessment of curation and preservation measures also forms an important part of existing certification procedures for trustworthy digital repositories (TDRs) as offered, for example, by the CoreTrustSeal foundation, the nestor network, or ISO. The digital curation community is presented with the challenge of finding community-, organization-, and object-specific approaches to curation and preservation at the same time as defining the minimum level of curation and preservation measures expected from a TDR in sufficiently generic terms to ensure applicability to a wide array of repositories. Against this backdrop this presentation discusses the need for and benefits of community-agreed levels of curation and preservation to address this challenge, and considers the tiered model proposed by the CoreTrustSeal Board as an example.  The proposed model is then applied in an analysis of successful CoreTrustSeal applications from 2018-2022 in an effort to better understand the capacity of the curation and preservation levels to capture the respective practices of repositories and to identify potential gaps.

Understanding mistrust and distrust in public data infrastructures

This lightning talk is based on an ongoing research for a doctoral thesis on trust, distrust, and mistrust within the realm of public data infrastructures. The research aims to unravel how societal circumstances, particularly the political climate, impact mistrust and distrust in these infrastructures. It delves into the complexities and differences between trust, distrust, and mistrust, with a primary focus on the development of mistrust and distrust in public sector data infrastructures. While previous studies have largely explored trust in data repositories and public data infrastructures, this research focuses on distrust and mistrust. Drawing from infrastructure studies, it places emphasis on the embeddedness of infrastructures within political contexts, exploring how individuals distinguish between their distrust in a political system and their attitudes toward the infrastructures embedded within that system. Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs) are usually considered trustworthy, because they have been certified through auditing services (e.g. the CoreTrustSeal) and have substantial preservation plans in place. However, in times of contextual circumstances (e.g. political uncertainty) outside of the scope of certification, how can infrastructure providers really tell that their user community actually trusts them? This will be the main question posed during the talk. One exemplary case study explored in this ongoing research is the Data Rescue movement. In 2016 and 2017, the Data Rescue events, a series of hackathon-style gatherings, aimed to safeguard federal environmental data in the U.S., uniting scientists, information professionals, and activists across over 30 nationwide events. These initiatives responded to concerns about climate change denial and the perceived erosion of environmental protections under the Trump administration, inspired by similar efforts in Canada during the tenure of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. While these events were lauded as examples of archival data activism, their impact revealed the vulnerability of federal data, primarily in terms of access, amidst budget constraints and staffing reductions. Remarkably, the movement fell short of creating a comprehensive archive, and no endangered data was actually deleted. This grassroots activism underscored that data management and archiving are inherently political activities. Additionally, it underscored how trust in public data infrastructures can falter and how mistrusting or distrusting data infrastructures lead to activities in the realm of data activism. Importantly, this research proposes that studying distrust and mistrust in infrastructures instead of focusing on trust and trustworthiness can significantly advance our understanding of the relationships between information infrastructures and their users, complementing existing misinformation studies. Furthermore, it suggests that considering mistrust and distrust can enhance stakeholder management and service provision within infrastructures. The lightning talk will share insights from this ongoing research and the implications for data infrastructure providers, as well as the broader implications for TDRs in politically uncertain contexts  

[PUBLIC] Infra Finder - IDCC 2024

Infra Finder A new tool to enhance transparency, discoverability, and trust in open infrastructure Lauren B. Collister (presenter) Emmy Tsang Chrys Wu