The political science wave is fast moving, and in some senses may be better placed to kick start the sparse practice of sharing qualitative data in the US, and extend the Open agenda.
But first I want to start with looking at the ‘transparency’ dialogue space. I frequently note a confused and confusing use of terminology: Open Research; Open Access and Open Data. inherent in all three of these paradigms. ‘Open Access’ concerns egalitarian access to knowledge outputs such as journal papers, and ‘Open Data’ has a more china rcs data specific definition; according to the Open Knowledge Foundation, whereby “Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)”. Some social science research data cannot be completely open due to ethical and legal restrictions. For me, research transparency is really about Open Research.
One does not have to look far to observe an increasing number of transparency organisations in operation: The Research Data Alliance (RDA); the US Center for Open Science (COS) and the Berkeley Institute for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS); Experiment in governance and politics (egap); and more recently, APSA. In the UK we have the Open Data Institute (ODI) and the UK government has a number of transparency boards; Public Sector Transparency Board, Open Data User Group, Research Sector Transparency Board.