More than preservation: Creating motivational designs and tailored incentives in research data repositories

Preserving and sharing are core reproducible practices that require substantial efforts in preparing and documenting research data analyses. Dedicated tools and services are developed to support researchers in this process. However, lowering preservation barriers to partial data preservation might not only lead to insufficient data reuse in the future; we argue that it might prove insufficient to convince researchers to follow reproducible practices at large. Instead, we need a better understanding of incentive structures that research repositories can support and implement. In this presentation, we report on our researcher-centered studies in the context of a research preservation prototype service tailored to High Energy Physics experiments. Our studies show that an in-depth understanding of research practices allows to characterize technology’s secondary usage forms. If reflected in design, they can provide contributing scientists with meaningful benefits regarding automation, uncertainty coping, communication and collaboration. We further reflect on our research regarding the use of motivational and persuasive design and highlight the potential that researchers see in adopting such design tools. It will be interesting to compare the results of this study with research data preservation incentives in other scientific disciplines.