Practical use of research data: how are research data protected by law?

This bridging project takes a sociological and legal approach to examine how scholars from different disciplines handle research data. An empirical study will be undertaken to discover the discipline-specific practices of researchers in the treatment of their own data. Interviews will be conducted with doctoral students and postdocs in four disciplines (biology, linguistics, medicine, and psychology) about their current projects. Parallel research will be conducted to characterize the existing legal framework relating to research data. This framework will then be compared with the findings from interviews about scholars’ actual practices. The objectives of the bridging project are (a) to generate insights into academics’ action orientation regarding the question of how to handle research data, and (b) to use these findings to evaluate the current laws in this area.