The Committee for Open Science’s Research Data College has carried out a survey (in French) of the management and openness of data produced in the framework of participatory research. 

This survey was carried out between November 28th 2021 and January 30th 2022 and put particular emphasis on the quality of the data and metadata obtained by participatory research.

The vast majority (92.5%) of survey respondents worked in public institutions. The survey’s deliberate disciplinary distribution brought responses from all disciplinary fields. 88 respondents had already organised a participatory research project and among these: 

• 30.7% said they had used a data management plan;
• 55.2% stated that they had a prior strategy to ensure data quality, 60.5% implemented this kind of strategy a posteriori and only 27.9% had implemented a strategy to ensure metadata quality.

Overall, respondents said that participatory research approaches are beneficial for their data, bring an increase in the amount of data, a broader geographical and sociological variety of data and involve a wider variety of experimental conditions.

On the subject of dissemination, 30.9% of respondents said that they systematically or often open their data while 25.1% did so sometimes. The survey found dissemination licences were not used a great deal. Finally, 63.5% replied that they had a strategy for communicating the results of their activities to the general public or worked on scientific outreach.

The dual aim was to obtain feedback on the production and analysis of data and provide a guide for researchers wishing to set up a participatory research project.