To establish current practice and potential challenges in humanities data sharing, the STM Association’s Humanities-focused Sub-Group conducted a researcher survey in Spring 2022. The findings will be used to create resources and guidance to assist authors in managing and sharing research data effectively.

The survey was designed to get first-hand input from humanities researchers on a range of topics around collecting, managing, sharing, publishing and even talking about data. It was designed to be fairly brief (less than 10 minutes to complete), and flexible to allow respondents to tell us about their own thoughts or practices as appropriate.

The survey received over 400 responses, and initial findings have been described in a chapter of the 2022 State of Open Data white paper, titled “Understanding and supporting data sharing in the humanities: new insights from a publisher survey”. An anonymised version of the survey dataset is also available for anyone to explore and reuse, here. You can also read a blogpost summarising our findings here.

As publishers, we are committed to supporting and guiding researchers in the handling and sharing of their data and hope to create a set of transparent, industry-led resources to help authors understand and engage with data policies and the data itself. If you have any queries about this survey, please contact the co-chairs of the humanities subgroup.