Approaching Trust: Case Studies for Developing Global Research Infrastructures.

Abstract

Research is a global endeavor of iteration and collaboration. Research requires trust-building: shared understanding of process, access to source data, and points of validation. A number of trust structures are used by researchers: disciplinary societies cohere practices among researchers, educational degrees and institutional affiliation are proxies of trust, as is publication of research findings in status journals (Haak and Wagner, 2021). These trust structures require interactions among many stakeholder groups, operating within and across disciplines, institutions, and countries. This is where research infrastructures come into play. These infrastructures support knowledge sharing across stakeholder borders, and at the best of times create a foundation for collaboration (Edwards et al., 2013; Haak et al., 2020). Examples of globalscale research infrastructures include article indexing platforms, researcher profile systems, federated identity systems, data repositories, and global data collection systems. More recently, the research community has started to pay more interest to the governance and sustainability aspects of these infrastructures (Bilder et al., 2020; Skinner, 2019). Organizations such as the Research Data Alliance have fostered cross-disciplinary self-organization of community stakeholders, out of which have come truly amazing consensus rules of behavior—principles of findability and accessibility (Wilkinson et al., 2016), as well as responsibility and ethics (Carroll et al., 2020)—that can be applied to infrastructures to improve research rigor and reproducibility and ultimately improve trust and engagement in the research process. In this article, we share our “in the trenches” experiences of how these principles, when applied in practice, can drive research infrastructure adoption. Infrastructure is more than a platform, it is a public good, so we need to ensure its accessibility and sustainability. How it is constructed, governed, and maintained requires intentional engagement and alignment of diverse stakeholders across social and economic factors to maximize trust, utility and impact on public welfare (Dhanshyam and Srivastava, 2021). What we have found is that without alignment and engagement, trust-building suffers. The lower the trust—even for a really strong technology that is desperately needed by the research community—the steeper the uphill push to adopt and implement the infrastructure.