In Swedish research politics there are, at the moment, several actions taken to enhance existing and develop new research infrastructures (Axelsson and Schroeder 2007). As one example, the Swedish National Data Service (SND, http://www.snd.gu.se), an operative key actor is currently working on coordinating existing data resources and increasing deposition of research data to the national data service and re-use of those data. SND has, as a part of this endeavour, recently conducted two survey studies, targeted at professors (N=549) and doctoral students within social sciences and humanities departments (N=1147) at Swedish universities and university colleges, in order to obtain knowledge regarding existing use and re-use of digital research data and archiving practices as well as oobstacles to increased digital research data sharing. This paper focuses on the doctoral students’ data and the results are compared with the results from the parallel study of the professors and from a recent survey targeted at professors in various social sciences and humanities disciplines at Finnish universities (Kuula and Borg, 2008).
The results from the current study show that doctoral students in general expressed a great uncertainty about questions of amounts of reusable digital data and effective interventions to enhance accessibility to digital research data. They identifies research ethical aspects as important barriers to sharing digital research data, while professors emphasize lack of resources for researchers to document and make their data accessible for others as the most important obstacle. Concerning interventions to enhancing re-use of digital data, the majority of the doctoral students and the professors thought it should be effective to get more information about accessible research data in data archives or databases. Nearly 100 % in both groups reported that also more of training in research methods, digital research databases and information about accessible e-tools would be effective interventions. The most effective interventions for enhancing accessibility to digital data were reported in terms of that research grants should include funds for preparing the data for sharing and archiving and that archiving data for the use by the scientific community is acknowledged to be scientific merit. Surprisingly, when it comes to the degree of urgency in sharing their own data, the professors seem to be a bit more eager to share data than the doctoral students.