Using Metadata to Promote Transparency in Health Research

Creating the COVID Measures Archive at ICPSR

Abstract

Data sharing is a key strategy for fostering transparency, reproducibility, and trust in scientific research. Data sharing is endorsed and even required by many funders, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. However, many NIH-funded projects face obstacles to data sharing, either to protect research participants’ privacy, safeguard proprietary data, or remain compliant with data use agreements. Yet event researchers who cannot openly share data still benefit from openness and transparency into one another’s work, and to making their own research more transparent where possible.

The Social, Behavioral, and Economic COVID Coordinating Center at ICPSR (SBE CCC) has launched a new archive aimed at addressing these challenges within the domain of social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research into the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2023, SBE CCC launched the COVID measures archive with the dual goals of a) offering researchers the ability to compare measures across SBE studies of COVID while b) protecting contributors’ needs for privacy and confidentiality in health research. The COVID measures archive primarily holds variable-level metadata, which provides visibility into the individual variables and measures employed in studies without necessitating the sharing of confidential or restricted data.

This brief report describes the features of the COVID measures archive and illustrates how it can be used to foster transparency and consistency across SBE COVID studies.