Data Donation Community - Fall 2025 Newsletter |
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Dear Data Donation Community,
This Fall newsletter brings urgent news about GDPR, exciting funding announcements for the Netherlands, and opportunities to join our growing networks. |
Data donation research is under threat from a proposed EU GDPR amendment.
Join researchers across Europe in protecting this crucial method for independent platform research. The letter will be sent to the European Commission on December 15, 2025. |
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Funding for data donation infrastructures in the Netherlands |
€16.8 million for Macroscope |
The Netherlands is investing €16.8 million in the Macroscope, a new national research infrastructure to study social change, misinformation, and trust at the population level. Coordinated by Erasmus University Rotterdam and jointly developed by ODISSEI and CLARIAH with many partners, the Macroscope will securely link and analyse large-scale social, cultural, and digital datasets.
Data donation will play a key role in this effort by providing high-quality digital behavioural data that can be studied in secure environments to answer pressing questions about media, trust, and social cohesion. |
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D3I Receives Permanent Funding |
In the last years, PDI-SSH funding has allowed D3I to develop and maintain a research infrastructure for data donation in the Netherlands, resulting in the Port Data Donation software. This funding has now been made permanent, meaning D3I can continue development efforts and researcher support.
This has already resulted in two big changes in the last month:
- Researchers at institutions in the Netherlands will be able to set up data donation studies for free on Next hosted by Eyra
- Research engineer Danielle McCool joined the team to provide methodological and technical support for data donation studies
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We are building an institutional network for organisations that want to take shared responsibility for data donation research. As a member, your institution can exchange knowledge, find collaborators, host or co-organise future symposia, and support PhD projects and research visits. Institutions designate a contact person who joins our twice-yearly online meetings and agrees to be listed on our institutional network page. We will also set up systems to share software, legal templates, and other materials.
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We also facilitate an informal PhD network for early-career researchers working with data donation, coordinated by our PhD representative Elisabeth Schmidbauer. Through this network, PhDs can exchange experiences, coordinate around conferences, and share questions, ideas, and opportunities in a low-threshold way. If you sign up, your contact details will be used to keep you informed and, if you agree, may be shared within the PhD network to support direct peer-to-peer connections.
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Next data donation symposium |
The next Data Donation Symposium will take place on 1–2 October 2026 at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.
We will open the call for contributions at the beginning of next year, but you can already save the date and read more about previous symposia and topics on our website. |
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New initiative: Reporting standards for data donation studies |
| As data donation becomes a more widely used method for collecting digital behavioural and other data, it is increasingly clear that reporting practices vary greatly between studies. Our systematic review shows inconsistencies in how participant numbers, consent rates, data quality, sociodemographics, and consent and anonymisation procedures are described, making it difficult to compare and improve studies. We therefore launch a new initiative to develop reporting standards for data donation research, including recommendations and a reporting template. We invite researchers working with data donations at any stage of the data lifecycle to join this effort or serve as expert reviewers—your experience is crucial for improving interpretability, replicability, and reproducibility in this field. If you are interested in contributing, please get in touch with Dr. Vanessa Lux (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences). |
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