Reciprocity of Data Sharing Infrastructures: A Conceptual Norms Framework

Data sharing infrastructures are increasingly encouraged and set up at the European level. We hypothesize that their success will depend on the quantitative and qualitative contributions of virtual data and the balance between data contribution and retrieval. While, indeed, there is sharing taking place in the semantic sense of the term, we identify that reciprocity is a more adequate description of the participants’ underlying social processes. The aim of this paper is to transfer the concept of reciprocity from the individual level to the data sharing setting. How can reciprocity be described in the data sharing context? What are differences to reciprocity at the individual level? We distinguish the moral, social, and legal levels of norms to build a conceptual framework. Furthermore, we introduce four contingencies to account for the changed context of both the decision entity and the characteristics of virtual data. Our study concludes with a suggestion to conceptually describe a “reciprocity norm of data sharing.”