Ronald Meijer et al.
WODC distinguishes three steps towards the opening of data while protecting privacy. At first an experienced data manager carefully studies a data request to see which variables are necessary for an applicant, whether the required variables could be delivered from the centrally archived research data or the DW. The data manager prepares a preliminary decision to a request by making a report with considerations such as legal requirements, policy sensitivity and quantity of work for WODC. This document is sent to the workgroup of DPPA asking them to exam the legal conditions of the request. The data request is tested on the criteria of the DPPA by the workgroup. In this phase every kind of convertible( personal) facts not in agreement with privacy laws and rules are removed. When necessary a Trusted Third Party is included in the data request project, in order to prevent the unnecessary transfer of privacy sensitive data( Braak et al. 2012). The subsequent and final stage is the judgment of the board of directors. Board members discuss the request looking at the advice written by the data manager( based on their experience and comments of the DPPA workgroup) and decide whether or not the data should be delivered to the requested party and on which conditions. An appraisal of the board of directors leads to delivering data after signing a standard agreement and specific conditions of reuse by the applicant.
5. Conclusion
We have observed a relationship between OD and public values. This relationship is described by the values trust, transparency, privacy, and security. As we have argued, several contradictions between these values exist. To solve these contradictions we have introduced the notion of precommitment: a policy‐instrument whereby an organization imposes some restraint on its policy in order to restrict the extent to which values may conflict and stakeholders have to worry about the trustworthiness of that policy. We have elaborated this notion in a rigorous data request procedure. To manage the contradictions between values we combine this procedure with a data infrastructure. By means of the WODC case, we have illustrated how contradictions are handled.
The case illustrates how the priority to protect privacy on the one hand leads to the limitation of the opening of data to the public, but on the other hand gives the opportunity to OD in a restricted mode for scientific goals. A DW assures reliability of answers to statistical information requests. Hereby privacy is protected by presenting only very highly aggregated data to the general public. Requests for data supply mostly concern data on the level of unique identifying records in research datasets or registration data. Therefore in these type of requests most of the time, privacy sensitive data is involved. In these cases data is supplied only for scientific goals in compliance with the privacy laws and regulations. Moreover, by verifying the data on legal and policy confidentiality points of views on several moments in different phases, the chance of failure is reduced to a minimum, thus maintaining trust. Opening data to scientists creates possibilities to re‐use and( partly) replicate existing research findings, thereby contributing to trust.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Rochelle Choenni for her valuable contribution to this paper, in particular for verifying the final version on correct and fluent English.
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