Two new projects from the University of Michigan School of Information and ICPSR are working to build systems to enhance digital researcher credentials and data storage, in an effort to make data storing and sharing more secure and to make research credentials more transparent.
The three main objectives of the Open Badge project are:
- to develop a badge system for managing researcher credentials,
- to articulate levels of data sensitivity and risk that indicate criteria for access, and
- to identify the right balance between openness and privacy for data users in a restricted data access system.
The project team, which includes researchers from the School of Information and ICPSR, says that transparent research credentials will “signal achievement, affiliation, authorization, or another trust relationship and are shareable across the web. They allow individuals to present their evolving credentials openly and to record their achievements and credentials publicly….The system provides verifiable, portable credentials for users to share with data providers when requesting access to restricted data.” The credentialing system that the ICPSR uses works well to protect data, and the Open Badge project’s aim is to provide the same kind of protection to researchers.
The Open Badge project builds on another project by researchers affiliated with the ICPSR and the University of Michigan School of Information, “The Researcher Passport: Improving Data Access and Confidentiality Protection.” The Researcher Passport creates a digital identity for researchers to more easily apply and gain access to a variety of repositories and the data stored within them, as well as providing researchers with a more standardized way to link researchers with their data to make the work more shareable and accessible. The Researcher Passport was created as a response to the data breaches and social media data collection policies that made the news in 2018, in an effort to create more secure methods of data storing and sharing.
The Researcher Passport research team is also welcoming feedback, ideas, and questions about the work that they are doing, through this survey.