A New Model for Industry–Academic Partnerships

Bibliographic Data

ID6096348
AuthorsGary King (0000-0002-5327-7631, Harvard University Press), Nathaniel Persily (0000-0001-9649-3249, Stanford University)
Year2020
Volume53
Issue4
Pages703-709
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePS Political Science & Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1049-0965 • E-ISSN: 1537-5935
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1049096519001021
OpenAlexW2969656656
LanguageEN
Citations received38
References cited9

The mission of the social sciences is to understand and ameliorate society’s greatest challenges. The data held by private companies, collected for different purposes, hold vast potential to further this mission. Yet, because of consumer privacy, trade secrets, proprietary content, and political sensitivities, these datasets are often inaccessible to scholars. We propose a novel organizational model to address these problems. We also report on the first partnership under this model, to study the incendiary issues surrounding the impact of social media on elections and democracy: Facebook provides (privacy-preserving) data access; eight ideologically and substantively diverse charitable foundations provide initial funding; an organization of academics we created, Social Science One, leads the project; and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard and the Social Science Research Council provide logistical help

Big data · Business · Democracy · General partnership · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social media · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing · Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Public Administration

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