Dear AOIR Community, If any of you plan to attend the Sunbelt conference this year and have an interest in exploring the challenges and advantages of open science, especially in relation to open research data, we invite you to consider submitting your work to our session "Gaining and giving access to network data: the challenges of open network science"! https://sunbelt2024.com/ Deadline: 4 February 2024, 11:59 pm GMT With best wishes, Katja Mayer ---- Sunbelt 2024 CALL FOR PAPERS SESSION – Gaining and giving access to network data: the challenges of open network science FORMAT – In-person (Edinburgh, June 24-30) ORGANIZERS – Katja Mayer (Universität Wien), Zachary Neal (Michigan State), Juergen Pfeffer (Technical University of Munich) DESCRIPTION – This session delves into the complexities of gaining and giving access to network data, presenting numerous challenges for researchers. Especially within the realm of social media, recent years have witnessed shifts in data access methods, such as APIs, data visits, and scraping data from platforms. However, some access methods often conflict with the licensing or usage terms. Furthermore, access to data from organisational, financial, biological, or health networks grapples with user privacy, ethical issues, and evolving regulations. With the increasing attention to open science, researchers encounter pressures from funders, journals, and their academic peers to open and share their data. This movement, championing transparency and reproducibility, introduces its own challenges. Balancing data acquisition hurdles with sharing requirements adds layers of complexity to the research process. Merely visiting data—especially remotely—without understanding its completeness, sampling methods, etc., poses challenges. Archival data might lack context or harbour unseen biases, complicating its secondary use. In contrast, field-gathered data often have issues with consent, representation, and timeliness, which make them challenging not only to access but also to share. Beyond academia, these challenges have wider implications. Professionals in journalism, public policy, and more face comparable hurdles in their pursuit of network data-driven insights. This session seeks presentations that are reflecting on personal experiences with access strategies, emphasising the interplay between data access and quality. How do researchers today access elusive network data unprepared for scientific use? What data, meta-data, or descriptions are essential for secondary data usage to ensure both integrity and ethical considerations? How have researchers successfully shared their data, information, and methodologies? In this session, we aim to dissect these challenges but also the emerging innovations in network data access. We welcome presentations that share personal experiences with intricate data access and quality, illuminating the broader consequences of these changes, and collaboratively exploring avenues for rigorous, ethical, and impactful research. Based on the presentations and insights from this session, a special issue is planned to further disseminate and explore these topics. Deadline: 4 February 2024, 11:59 pm GMT via conference system FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Katja Mayer at katja.mayer@univie.ac.at