This guidebook was developed following a training workshop called 'The Ethics of Sharing Fieldwork Data and the CARE Principles' held in The Hague on 8 May 2025. This workshop was one of three thematic workshops that addressed different elements of hard-to-share data in the social sciences and humanities. About the guide: The relationship between research ethics, data ethics, and data governance practices that serve the needs of different types of communities is explored in depth by various actors spanning cross-cutting scientific and community contexts. The CARE Principles are one prominent result of such work. They offer a structured and close-to-practice framework for Indigenous data governance, and they can also provide inspiration for conversations on data governance in other communities. For the latter, we use the term “CARE-informed”. However, in the context of Dutch universities and other Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), CARE and CARE-informed data governance has yet to materialise into clear, proximate guidance that can steer researchers in their daily choices of whether to share research data, with whom to share, and how to share, while remaining compliant with institutional policies and practices. With this guide, we hope to try and bridge this gap, and support early-career researchers who wish to actively reflect on how to apply CARE and CARE-informed practices in their research while acknowledging the role that RPOs, Funders, Heritage Organisations, and other institutions would need to play in their facilitation. The guide is divided in two parts. In the first part we introduce the CARE Principles, their relevance for Indigenous data governance and other vulnerable communities. In addition, we highlight some choices that Dutch RPOs can make in terms of data management and ethics review practices to support adoption of CARE. In the second part we introduce guiding questions for early-career researchers related to each CARE principle, supplemented by examples and best practices in the reference list. These guiding questions emerged from two workshops we held on this topic: a workshop with early-career researchers at the International Institute of Social Studies in Den Haag in May 2025 (see Section ‘Additional Resources’ below for the workshop slides) and a workshop at the Open Science Festival 2025. As our workshop participants acknowledged, the developing state of awareness and institutional and infrastructure readiness in The Netherlands does not allow us to provide ready-made solutions. Our aim is that this guide becomes a trusted reference for the conversations that we hope will take place. Related materials: Lushaj, B., Gelens, T., Magraw, J.-Y., Mos, A., Baloum, R.-C., & Hati Gitundu, (Beatrice) B. (2025). Workshop on The Ethics of Sharing Fieldwork Data and the CARE Principles. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15629394 The other workshops in this series of training workshops on 'hard-to-share data in the social sciences and humanities' are listed below and also generated two accompanying guidebooks: Thorpe, D. E., van den Berk, M., Flohr, P., van der Meer, L., Hesam, A., Campbell, R., & Oberheim, F. (2025, May 6). Workshop on Hard to Share Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities and using the Secure ANalysis Environment (SANE). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15302953 Thorpe, D. E. et al. (2025). 'Guidebook: Hard-to-Share Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities', Zenodo.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17588795 Flohr, P., van den Berk, M., Roodhof, A., Verheijen, J., Bruil, M., Thorpe, D.E. (2025), ‘Workshop - Sharing Field Notes’. Zenodo.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15600311Flohr, P., Roodhof, A. (2025). ‘Sharing Field Notes’, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17588823 Acknowledgements: This publication was part of the project ‘Beyond personal data: a new initiative to support early-career researchers with hard-to-share data’ with file number ICT.TDCC.001.002, which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) via the Thematic Digital Competence Centre Social Sciences & Humanities (TDCC-SSH). We would like to thank the invited speakers and the participants of the workshop, as well as the contributors and reviewers of this guide.
Lushaj et al. (Sun,) studied this question.