These terms may seem like synonyms, but they have different meanings when applying to research:
Social science research is often difficult to replicate, but its results should still be reproducible. Making data available with your publications allows other researchers to make sure that your findings are supported by your data through reproduction.
In the early 2010s, psychology researcher Brian Nosek and his team conducted replication experiments for 100 studies published in respected journals, and found that only 36% had similar statistically significant results. Further research was conducted in behavioural, social, and life sciences, showing that the problem was not limited to psychology.
Non-replicability of experiments can be explained by many reasons, including lack of documentation, errors, or in some cases outright fraud and data fabrication. One of the reasons why some journals and research funders are now asking researchers to share their research data is to give more ways to verify the validity of research results.
Research in the social sciences is usually harder to reproduce for multiple reasons: research participants have agency and contexts change, making experiments or observation less likely to provide similar results. The traditional epistemology of scientific research cannot apply as is, especially for research conducted based on qualitative methods.
This does not mean that research data has less value in the social sciences. Its reuse is still possible in many different ways, and the principle "as open as possible, as closed as necessary" should also apply to data collected in the Institute's research.
