Cultural aspects of research data sharing: A consumer culture theories perspective

Abstract This work examines how perspectives from consumer culture theories (CCT) could help information and library science (LIS) to better understand cultural aspects of research data sharing. Drawing from CCT research areas of identity projects, marketplace cultures, sociohistorical patterning of consumption, and mass‐mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers' interpretative strategies, this work suggests novel research avenues for LIS. CCT guides LIS to examine how data sharing relates to academic identities, academic possessions, and interconnected feelings. CCT also invites LIS to investigate how researchers experience connecting with the infrastructures aimed at the sharing of data and code, such as feelings of engagement. Furthermore, CCT invites LIS to conduct more field‐specific historical analyses of how the ideology of data sharing has emerged and which different sociological categories and technologies have been pertinent in these developments. CCT also guides LIS to investigate how culture transpires in algorithmic technologies and how the ideology of data sharing are mediated in these. These future lines of LIS research would benefit from using common CCT methods, such as autoethnography, netnography, and videography, as these also shed light on the affective, social, and embodied aspects of research data sharing and reveal insights that go beyond rational decision‐making models and behaviors.