GIGAPsych: An Open Database for Data Sharing

This project is the development of an openly accessible platform where researchers from around the world can share and request survey psychology data at the item level. The platform will contain survey data, such as personality traits, collected from online survey panels that offer a unique ID (e.g., Prolific, Mechanical Turk). The data will be automatically merged based on the unique pseudoanonymous ID that such panels offer. The main objectives of the project include (a) the development of standard templates on how researchers can share their data, (b) machine-readable codebooks to automate data merging, (c) legal documents to make the project compliant with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) addressing privacy and data management issues, and (d) a platform to either download data or provide real-time online analyses. The project has already been awarded a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the Netherlands, and at this stage we are working on a prototype version that focuses on personality inventories. Our final goal is to create an open platform that will enable the accumulation of raw and meta-data in the area of Psychology.