As part of our funders’ active promotion of research data sharing, we plan to make the anonymised data collected through project fieldwork available to other researchers following the end of the project.
These data are likely to be of value to researchers interested in diarrhoeal disease reduction through water and sanitation, particularly concerning the safe separation of livestock and people in the environment. Examples of possible uses of the data would include systematic reviews that make use of micro-data, for example in assessing the relationship between observed hazards at water sources and microbiological contamination, of the prevalence of microbiological contamination across different water source types, or of the effectiveness of different microbial source tracking techniques. There are some limitations to the use that our data can be put to. Most notably, the need to protect data relating to human subjects prevents us from sharing detailed locational information, such as GPS coordinates.
Data Sharing Arrangements
We have made some of our data accessible to other bona fide researchers alongside publication of articles resulting from the project, whichever is sooner. The remaining data will be made available on 1 August 2020, one year after the end of the project.
We have lodged a copy of our data with the UK Data Archive, generating meta-data to make the data discoverable by others. We have removed locational information and personal and meaningful household identifiers before archiving data from project fieldwork, so as to prevent any disclosure of personal information. There is no charge to users for sharing our data.
Water source survey data are available for bona fide research from http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853860, whilst participatory mapping data sets are available from http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853705. Faecal indicator bacteria and household survey data are available from https://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-854302.
Where data are not open access, the four project investigators at University of Southampton, University of Brighton, VIRED International and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) will jointly review any applications to access the project’s data. Their decisions will be overseen by an independent researcher within KEMRI who is not connected to the project. Researchers using the project data are required to sign a data sharing agreement, setting out the terms of appropriate use, publication and required acknowledgements, and data security arrangements.
For the convenience of our participants with internet access, a copy of the University of Southampton’s privacy notice may be found here.
Informal enquiries about data sharing
For informal enquiries concerning the data that will be generated through the project, please contact either:
Dr. Jim Wright, Geography and Environment, University of Southampton, UK: j.a.wright@soton.ac.uk.
Dr. Thumbi Mwangi, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Kenya: thumbi.mwangi@wsu.edu.