Mobility data of researchers
This Project explores researchers mobility with the main goals
- to provide opportunities for researchers when they travel,
- to connect them to local educational associations and citizen science projects.
Why might I want to join this project? What are its goals?
The project is investigating the main research questions:
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How can the study of global researcher mobility data lead to actionable positive impact (for example, organisation of outreach to remote communities or contribution to
problem solving for local communities around the globe)?
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How to improve the communication between researchers (and general knowledge "honey bees") and local communities, knowing that researchers travel from place X to place Y and could potentially make a lecture or discuss with the community?
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How can we benefit from our travels? (analysis of depersonalised information about our travels and meta-information of who is traveling can provide more information about how we can use it for social good)
Who is running this project?
The project is organised by the group of researchers from University of Paris (CRI), NGO project "Lecturers without borders".
What will I be asked to do for this project?
For this project you can provide two types of information:
- Your Google Location History information via Open Humans (for researchers)
- Fill a Survey about your travels around the world along with data about your professional activity (researcher/industry/etc.), small metadata about your travel.
What data will you have access to?
We (as researchers and science community) will analyze travel/movement history from Google Location History, along with the survey data from google-form, we will collect the meta information in google-form survey. Google form survey provides valuable meta information. With ORCID information one can also analyze information about publications (and hence analyze information about affiliations with the universities, in which the researcher was working in the past). This can help to help to analyze the knowledge dissemination process on a wider time-range.
The detailed location data (GPS) is potentially sensitive, as it could theoretically be used to infer the addresses of your home and workplace, and the address of any other locations you visited, and the times you visited those places. We state here that the materials here are not used for estimation of personal information about the most visited cities. The project aims at collection of the information of general travel trends of people (in particular, researchers).
Due to sensitivity of the data we will take special care of your data. The data won't be shared with any third parties and analysis will be done by researchers who are responsible for this project (see below). Moreover, we specify that the results of analysis of geolocation data won't mention any information about people contributing to the project. The results of the project "Researchers' mobility" will help NGO projects worldwide (such as "Lecturers without borders" and local NGOs in developing countries), to identify places around the globe, where knowledge (lectures or seminars) can be delivered. Since most of educational NGOs worldwide do not have access to such mobility data, the project on "Researchers' mobility" on Openhumans can help them with providing this essential additional information from depersonalized data analysis.
Previous research on this topic.
Previously we did a survey analysis for Marie-Curie researchers to get the information about where they travel (survey results). Broader and deeper analysis on this topic is needed, therefore we started this project on mobility of researchers.
What will you do with my data? Who will you share it with?
We will analyze the researchers' mobility data and will share results of the analysis with all participants. Our analysis aims at providing additional information about the untapped opportunity of traveling researchers around the world for social good (see also the publications [1,2]).
The data will only be analysed by the project leader Liubov Tupikina.
The project data collection was discussed and developed with researchers: Vero Estrada-Galinanes, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Marc Santolini and will not be shared with 3rd parties. The project was discussed with researchers Delphine Zemp, Athanasia Nikolau, co-founding NGO LeWiBo for traveling scientists with Liubov.
The general results of the project then will be shared with participants, we also will create Notebooks for your to play and analyze your data interactively.
An example of where general results of analysis could be applied is „Lecturers without borders", where scientists and educators use travel opportunities to connect to local educational projects. In this project researchers built global open network around the world. Nowadays it includes traveling scientists from Indonesia, India, Nepal, Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Senegal, Italy, Uganda. In order to study the untapped opportunity of traveling scientists around the globe we need to understand the mobility paths.