Hi all, thanks for all the info. I'm a DERP fellow, which means I was planning on participating in this as a researcher (I'm doing some work on reddit, too) as well as serving as an advisory board. I apparently haven't been involved in the same threads/calls with the DERP organizers that Aaron, Jonathan, and Dario have been on, and I'm kind of shocked at what I'm hearing. I completely believe you guys, it just runs so opposite to what I've been told that I'm dreading the e-mail I think I'm going to have to write to the DERP folks.
This is the first time I've heard anything about DERP being much more than an informal communication broker between organizations and academic researchers. DERP was pitched to me as a big signaling mechanism to researchers, platforms, and the public that there are spaces outside of Facebook and Twitter to do research. Wikimedia obviously doesn't need DERP as much as some of the smaller platforms do, but I thought it would be great for Wikimedia's presence (yes, the logo) to be there, standing in solidarity with the lesser-researched platforms. As it was explained to me, all that was supposed to be involved in a platform joining DERP is 1) a public declaration that they are open to receiving requests from researchers via DERP and 2) a commitment to review and respond to proposals that were e-mailed from researchers to DERP. In one of the fellows calls, I actually think someone asked whether DERP would be like an Institutional Review Board that would independently approve/reject studies, and we all thought that it would be better for these to be done on a case-by-case basis between the researcher and the platform(s).
Early on, I actually suggested adding some language about ethics. I suggested that as we started these projects, it would be great to develop an ongoing, informal set of best practices for doing computational social science in an academic/industry partnership -- particularly in the wake of the Facebook emotion contagion study. Something like a series of blog posts about the various ethical issues we encountered in the course of doing this kind of research across a bunch of different platforms, and ways that they were resolved. Perhaps that might synthesize into a mini workshop culminating in a whitepaper, but it wouldn't ever be binding. As I was told about it, DERP's direct role ends once the researcher has made successful contact with the platform, aside from very high-level community organizing things like discussions about best practices. Same thing with data standards -- it is a fool's errand to mandate those, but I was told that DERP might one day be a hub where people could talk about how to integrate data from different platforms.
I did see the language that "All research supported by DERP will be released openly and made publicly available," but I interpreted this as something even weaker than Green OA -- that even if you publish in a closed access journal, you have to write something up about the research. Kind of like what Aaron did with our ABS paper. [1] The idea was that you should't be able to do studies in the dark without anybody ever knowing about them. The fellows were told that this wouldn't apply to datasets at all. And given how many qualitative researchers are fellows and planning on doing interviews, the concern that we would have to release full interview transcripts was specifically brought up. Again, the idea was that DERP might later develop some optional, guiding best practices to make things easier, but any conditions of data access were supposed to be negotiated between the researcher and the platform. I remember asking if DERP was supposed to be some kind of central repository for storing data, and that was resoundingly rejected.
So if DERP has shifted beyond this, that would be a pretty serious matter of concern for me.
Best,
Stuart