How to share psychological research data: Recommendations from the German Psychological Society

Sharing research data more and more is becoming the norm in psychological research, because many researchers see the necessity and usefulness, and an increasing number of journals and funders simply demands it. On the practical level, however, many questions arise: How can we protect participants' privacy and be as open as possible at the same time? In what way can we ensure the legitimate interest of data providers to enact their "right of first usage", in particular when early career researchers invest a lot of time and effort in data collection? Is a co-authorship of data providers warranted, and if so, under which conditions? What happens in the case of misconduct or less severe violations of norms? These are just a few relevant questions that arise when data sharing gets more common, and no firm explicit or implicit norms have been established yet on many of them. In 2016, a working group of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) published their first recommendations on data sharing. Five years later, with a evaluation study and many discussions providing new insights, the open science commission of the DGPs released an update of the recommendations (https://psyarxiv.com/24ncs/). In this talk, I will present the most important aspects of the recommendations, and explain how we aimed to balance multiple legitimate interests of data providers, data reusers, and society, to arrive at a practical system of data sharing that benefits science.