When sharing research data for verification and reuse, behavioural researchers should protect participants’ privacy, particularly when studying sensitive topics. Because personally identifying data remain present in many open psychology datasets, we urge researchers to mend privacy via checks of re-identification risk before sharing data. We offer guidance for sharing responsibly.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
References
Wicherts, J. M. Science revolves around the data. J. Open Psychol. Data 1, e1 (2013).
American Psychological Association. Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (American Psychological Association, 2017).
Purtova, N. Law Innov. Technol. 10, 40–81 (2018).
Wicherts, J. M., Klein, R. A. & Hartgerink, C. H. J. Automatic detection of identifiers in open data (ADIODA). researchequals.com, https://doi.org/10.53962/qj4h-2j1n (2022).
El Emam, K., Jonker, E., Arbuckle, L. & Malin, B. PLoS ONE 6, e28071 (2011).
Sweeney, L. Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Data Privacy Working Paper 3) (Carnegie Mellon Univ, 2000).
Wicherts, J. M. et al. Privacy protection in the era of open science. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ybzu9 (2022).
Meyer, M. N. Adv. Methods Pract. Psychol. Sci. 1, 131–144 (2018).
Walsh, C. G. et al. Adv. Methods Pract. Psychol. Sci. 1, 104–114 (2018).
Acknowledgements
C. Hartgerink (Liberate Science GmbH) also contributed to this work and was originally included as a co-author. He opted to withdraw from the author list because this piece could not be published under an open access licence. Our work was supported by a Consolidator Grant (726361 IMPROVE) of the European Research Council (ERC) and an Open Science Fund grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO 203.001.155).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wicherts, J.M., Klein, R.A., Swaans, S.H.F. et al. How to protect privacy in open data. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1603–1605 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01481-w
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01481-w