Boundary Negotiating Artifacts to Envision the Desired Research Data Infrastructure toward Reproducibility in Data-Intensive Science

Abstract New data-intensive research paradigms and surging volumes of research data have amplified the need for more effective systems of data curation, management, and sharing. This methodological paper focuses on the development and implementation of a workshop protocol aimed at enabling researchers in various sub-disciplines of data-intensive fields to achieve consensus about data-sharing and reproducibility practices. As such, it addresses a key gap in our understanding of how researchers from those sub-disciplines negotiate and reach consensus on disciplinary practices, which is crucially important to the design of research-data infrastructure and data-management support services. Specifically, we first convened a design-thinking workshop, attended by 17 principal investigators from the field of data-intensive health science, which simulated the identification and solution of real-life research problems in a multidisciplinary context. A key plank of our methodology is its use of boundary-negotiating artifacts as a conceptual model to delineate and analyze the artifacts (e.g., Post-its and other notes) that were created and used during the workshop. This approach provided insights into the development and evolution of common practices in the participants’ workplaces. Then, to validate and extend our methodology, we applied the workshop protocol to two additional case studies, respectively involving 30 academic librarians and 13 criminologists. The results confirm the potential applicability and adaptability of our approach to even more data-intensive disciplines, and provide insights that should be valuable to a range of stakeholders including but not limited to national funders, memory institutions, and research establishments.