DATA ACCESS & RESEARCH TRANSPARENCY
2014 DART Symposium
In the Spring 2014 edition of PS: Political Science and Politics, a collection of scholars, archivists, and journal editors wrote a collection of essays about the 2012 changes to the APSA Ethics Guide and its potential implications for scholarship and publishing. The opening article, by Arthur Lupia (University of Michigan) and Colin Elman (Syracuse University), describe the history of the DA-RT idea and the sequence of events that led the APSA Council to unanimously approve new guidelines about data sharing and research transparency. Subsequent articles by Lupia, Elman, George Alter (ICPSR), and Diana Kapieszewski (Georgetown University) provide broad overviews of opportunities and challenges associated with instantiating the new ethics guidelines in political science's diverse research communities. The issue then continues with a series of articles by Thomas Carsey (University of North Carolina), Allan Dafoe (Yale University), John Ishiyama (American Political Science Review lead editor), Rose McDermott (Brown University), and Andrew Moravscik (Princeton University) that offer more focused analyses of specific opportunities and challenges. Collectively, this symposium reveals some of the promise of greater transparency for individual scholars and research communities while also documenting some of the challenges associated with attempts to turn broad guidelines into meaningful policies.