Open Access to Research Data: Strategic Delay and the Ambiguous Welfare Effects of Mandatory Data Disclosure
Posted: February 23rd, 2015 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Data Policy, Data Sharing, EDaWaX | Tags: Data Policies, Strategic Delay, Welfare Effects | Comments Off on Open Access to Research Data: Strategic Delay and the Ambiguous Welfare Effects of Mandatory Data Disclosure
Patrick Andreoli-Versbach and Frank Mueller-Langer (two economists from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich) have published a paper on strategic delay and the ambiguous welfare effects of mandatory data disclosure (2014).
By setting up a model describing the incentives of a researcher to share self-generated data with the research community in the context of a published article, they found that these incentives can be distorted by a policy they call “First Paper Policy” (requires authors to share their data immediately after the first publication):
In the first place, the author might strategically delay the submission in order to publish further work on the basis of the data and preventing other researchers from working with it at the same time. The author’s decision whether he or she will strategically delay the submission depends on the author’s impatience to publish, the value of the data, and the factor by which the data’s value decreases with a rising number of publications based on it.
Secondly, the author might reduce the effort to create data, because he or she would not be able to use the data exclusively for him-/herself after publication.
On the basis of a welfare analysis, Mueller-Langer and Andreoli-Versbach (2014) conclude that a mandatory data disclosure policy has negative welfare effects if it creates strategic delays. In this case, the data cannot be used by the research community for further research. But if researchers have no incentives to delay the time of publication and if the positive effect of data availability is higher than the negative effect of reduced efforts during data creation, the existence of a mandatory data disclosure policy will be welfare enhancing.
That is why Mueller-Langer and Andreoli-Versbach (2014, p. 20) recommend the following:
“We conclude that the implementation of mandatory data sharing rules should be complemented by other policies that deter strategic delay, such as career incentives, and increase the stand-alone value of academic data, such as new standards for data citation and the establishment of data journals. We also recommend the establishment of journals for replication studies in economics.”
References
Mueller-Langer, Frank; Andreoli-Versbach, Patrick (2014). Open Access to Research Data: Strategic Delay and the Ambiguous Welfare Effects of Mandatory Data Disclosure. Munich Discussion Paper No. 2014-32. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/104444.
Picture: “delays” by Omar Parada on flickr.com. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
