[Air-L] CfP Gaining and giving access to network data: the challenges of open network science (Sunbelt Conference 2024)

[Katja Mayer]

Dear AOIR Community,

If any of you plan to attend the Sunbelt conference this year and have 
an interest in exploring the challenges and advantages of open science, 
especially in relation to open research data, we invite you to consider 
submitting your work to our session "Gaining and giving access to 
network data: the challenges of open network science"!

https://sunbelt2024.com/

Deadline:  4 February 2024, 11:59 pm GMT

With best wishes,

Katja Mayer

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Sunbelt 2024 CALL FOR PAPERS

SESSION –
Gaining and giving access to network data: the challenges of open 
network science

FORMAT –
In-person (Edinburgh, June 24-30)

ORGANIZERS –
Katja Mayer (Universität Wien), Zachary Neal (Michigan State), Juergen 
Pfeffer (Technical University of Munich)

DESCRIPTION –
This session delves into the complexities of gaining and giving access 
to network data, presenting numerous challenges for researchers. 
Especially within the realm of social media, recent years have witnessed 
shifts in data access methods, such as APIs, data visits, and scraping 
data from platforms. However, some access methods often conflict with 
the licensing or usage terms. Furthermore, access to data from 
organisational, financial, biological, or health networks grapples with 
user privacy, ethical issues, and evolving regulations.

With the increasing attention to open science, researchers encounter 
pressures from funders, journals, and their academic peers to open and 
share their data. This movement, championing transparency and 
reproducibility, introduces its own challenges. Balancing data 
acquisition hurdles with sharing requirements adds layers of complexity 
to the research process. Merely visiting data—especially 
remotely—without understanding its completeness, sampling methods, etc., 
poses challenges. Archival data might lack context or harbour unseen 
biases, complicating its secondary use. In contrast, field-gathered data 
often have issues with consent, representation, and timeliness, which 
make them challenging not only to access but also to share. Beyond 
academia, these challenges have wider implications. Professionals in 
journalism, public policy, and more face comparable hurdles in their 
pursuit of network data-driven insights.

This session seeks presentations that are reflecting on personal 
experiences with access strategies, emphasising the interplay between 
data access and quality. How do researchers today access elusive network 
data unprepared for scientific use? What data, meta-data, or 
descriptions are essential for secondary data usage to ensure both 
integrity and ethical considerations? How have researchers successfully 
shared their data, information, and methodologies? In this session, we 
aim to dissect these challenges but also the emerging innovations in 
network data access. We welcome presentations that share personal 
experiences with intricate data access and quality, illuminating the 
broader consequences of these changes, and collaboratively exploring 
avenues for rigorous, ethical, and impactful research. Based on the 
presentations and insights from this session, a special issue is planned 
to further disseminate and explore these topics.

Deadline:  4 February 2024, 11:59 pm GMT via conference system

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Katja Mayer at katja.mayer at univie.ac.at