Through its Arab Social Science Data Archive initiative, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences organized a training on "Data Sharing for the Public Good" on April 9-11, 2019 in Beirut.
The training included 18 participants from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia, Palestine, and UAE working on data in academic settings, NGOs as well as the public and private sectors. The participants work in varying fields including Economics, Demography, Library and Archival Sciences, Linguistics, Medicine, Sociology, Statistics, and Urban planning.
The workshop focused on the following topics:
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The basics of data curation and the planning of institutional services for researchers;
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The benefits of quantitative data sharing to both the individual researcher and to the scientific enterprise as a whole;
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The complexities of research data based on disciplinary context, format, technical requirements, and applicable policies;
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The implementation of data management standards and best practices across the research data lifecycle;
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The application of the Data Quality Review framework for ensuring computational reproducibility of reported research findings; and
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Mechanisms for archiving research data for long-term preservation, discovery, access, and reuse.
This training was the second in a series of workshops on data sharing for the public good, which was kicked off in December 2018.
The Arab Social Science Data Archive initiative aims to address the fact that real challenges associated with sharing data with the broader community can be overcome with careful data management and planning.
This initiative created an ACSS Dataverse, an online, public-access archive for social science data produced in and on the Arab region. Another main activity of the initiative is capacity building on the importance of data archiving for social science and public policy, and on global best practices in data archiving. A series of workshops designed for researchers, administrators, librarians, and archivists are co-organized with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.