A meeting was held in Berlin on the 22nd of June, 2010, under the aegis of the UK Data Forum and the German Data Forum (RatSWD). The purpose of this meeting was to consider the role of libraries and archives for the acquisition, management and preservation of research data in the behavioural,...

Intergenerational relationships within family and kinship have become a salient issue in scientific research. Major reasons were intense demographic changes in the 20th century, such as the increased life expectancy in combination with decreased fertility, and its implications for major...

This paper investigates how scientists decide whether to share information with their colleagues or not. Detailed data on the decisions of 1,694 bio-scientists allow to detect similarities and differences between academia-based and industry-based scientists. Arguments from social capital theory...

Metadata, or data about data, play a crucial rule in social sciences to ensure that high quality documentation and community knowledge are properly captured and surround the data across its entire life cycle, from the early stages of production to secondary analysis by researchers or use by...

This essay sketches technical and non-technical issues around persistent identifiers (henceforth PIs) in a manner which makes no attempt to be complete. Our goal is to rescue the core notions from the obscurity which detail and completeness burdens them with. A reader willing to entertain the...

The central issues that should be answered by the criminal statistic system pertain to the extent, structure and development of crime rates, the decisions of authorities for prosecution and sanctioning, the amount and type of imposed criminal sanctions, the enforcement of sanctions and the...

Organizational data describe central characteristics of organizations, their internal structures and processes as well as their behavior as corporate actors in different social and economic contexts. Firm and enterprise data are the most frequently used type of organizational data, but there is...

The topic of this paper is access to and documentation of survey data financed through public funds. We distinguish between four types of publicly financed survey data: (1) Academic survey data from the national or international research infrastructures; (2) data from DFG projects or similarly...