Impact & Society, Data Collection Lou Coady Impact & Society, Data Collection Lou Coady

Humans broke the internet, understanding them better might help fix it

By Timo Hannay

Here's a multiple-choice question: Is the internet (a) the most open, egalitarian and empowering means of communication ever devised, or (b) a dystopian nightmare populated by hucksters, trolls and miscellaneous abusers of human rights? The answer is, of course, (c) all of the above and much else besides. This stark contrast between the internet's light and dark sides has become a defining characteristic of the digital age, but is not an inevitable consequence of the mostly innocuous technologies on which it's built. Rather, it is the product of their bewilderingly diverse and eccentric user base – otherwise known as humanity.

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Academic Researchers Need Support and Incentives to Share Data

Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, and reproduce is fundamental to open science, and ultimately makes research more efficient and effective. Yet despite policies that encourage and require data sharing, researchers in the UK and US report lower percentages of data sharing than average.

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