Open Science principles require that data that are collected and analysed as part of research projects are made available to other researchers at the end the project (van der Zee & Reich, 2018). This allows not only for replication, validation and generalization of research findings (van der Zee & Reich, 2018; (Tedersoo et al., 2021), but also for secondary data analyses. In general, data sharing is crucial for efficiency of scientific knowledge generation (Allen & Mehler, 2019; Nosek et al., 2015). It is also highly valuable for the individual researcher as scientific articles for which the data are published are cited more than articles for which the data are not available (Colavizza et al., 2020; Drachen et al., 2016; Piwowar et al., 2007). While in educational research more and more data are available for secondary analyses, a considerable proportion are not shared.

The proposed symposium aims at shedding more light on the factors explaining the reluctance to make data available as well as giving an overview of what can be accessed and puts an emphasis on the legal requirements. It describes the educational data landscape across several European countries and elaborates on specific legal aspects researchers struggle with. More precisely, it highlights the potential of the rich data that exist but is not (yet) available to secondary users. Often, researchers are willing to share their data but are insecure about how to make the data sharable and how to properly comply with the legal aspects, e.g. consent and copyright. Moreover, researchers are not always aware of options of restricted access and different layers of protection (including consent, anonymisation/pseudonymisation, and restricted access). Therefore, in this symposium we elaborate on challenges and best practices for sharing research data and provide practical guidance.

The symposium is a joint effort of researchers from four institutions from different European countries working on various aspects of data reuse and access to facilitate high quality educational research. The involved institutions are the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the University of Applied Sciences, Graubünden, and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS).

The symposium consists of three contributions. The first paper takes a comparative perspective on the availability of educational research data in five European countries, namely England, Norway, France, Sweden and Switzerland. These countries are compared along a number of relevant factors with regard to data access. Based on the analysis, implications for practice are derived. The second paper provides insight into the legal challenges of data sharing in an international research project. The third paper zooms in on the topic of the GDPR, it consists of two parts. First, the GDPR and its implications on research in education are described. Then, a description of how it got implemented in the context of TIMSS 2023.

With this symposium we aim at engaging in a debate with members from Network 12 “Open Science in Education”, as well as researchers from the other networks and we encourage emerging researchers to join the debate.

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