We believe that good research should be open and reproducible. As members of the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality ", we strive to make our research as transparent as possible by sharing our data and procedures with other researchers worldwide. In doing so, we hope to contribute to cumulative knowledge in the social sciences and foster collective progress in studying inequality. Since our research is publicly funded, it is our responsibility to share our data, procedures, and results publicly, depending on the scientific standards in the respective discipline. Also, we believe that research transparency contributes to improve the visibility of our work and our researchers.
Researchers at the Cluster follow the "Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice" and the "Guidelines on the Handling of Research Data"of the German Research Foundation (DFG). They are also bound to the "Research Data Management Policy" of the University of Konstanz.
In essence, we strive to make our research data "F A I R", i.e., it should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (Wilkinson et al. 2016). This means:
- data is well documented and has appropriate metadata
- data quality control measures are implemented
- storage of data is safe and secure
- legal and ethical issues are taken care of
- long-term preservation of data is guaranteed
- data sharing is managed through appropriate licenses
Our researchers are expected to coordinate all research management and dissemination with our research and data manager at the Cluster's Methods Hub. We also require our researchers to include a statement about research transparency and data handling in their project applications and progress reports.
To achieve this, the Cluster supports its researchers in several ways:
- We train our researchers in data management,
- we offer professional advice regarding data protection and ethical questions, practical data management, and data storage,
- we provide long-term access to datasets and replication materials that were compiled by Cluster researchers via the GESIS data repository,
- we ensure good visibility of our data through appropriate keywords and promote the data sets in the scientific community.