The world of business and economics research and information: Collaborate, compete or collapse? That is the question ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics raises at the third INCONECSS – International Conference on Economics and Business Information taking place on May 17 – 19, 2022. You would like to contribute? The call for contributions is now open! Further information is available here.

INCONECSS is an international conference for researchers, librarians and other information specialists supporting researchers in Economics and Business Studies. INCONECSS wants to be a platform for the exchange on changing user needs and services as well as on the evolving landscape of scholarly publishing.
INCONECSS encourages conversations between researchers, information specialists and other people working in fields related to information provision for research in Economics and Business Studies.

Every three months, ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics invites you to their INCONECSS Community Meetings where you can delve into current topics in the field of economics and business information and share your experience with others.

The upcoming INCONECSS Community Meetings will take place on:

Sep 27, 2021: Research Data: Representations, Analytics and Visualizations
Dec 13, 2021: Trainings and Games Related to Research Data

Sign up and further information: https://www.inconecss.eu/community.html

Sudden and unforeseen shocks can cause incalculable and fast-changing economic dynamics to which policy makers need to respond quickly – as we have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, data from traditional statistics that usually guide policy decisions are only available with non-negligible time delays. This leaves policy makers uncertain about how to most effectively manage their economic countermeasures to support businesses.

Given this information deficit, our colleagues from ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research propose a framework that guides policy makers throughout all stages of an unforeseen economic shock by providing timely and reliable data as a basis to make informed decisions. They do so by combining early stage ‘ad hoc’ web analyses, ‘follow-up’ business surveys, and ‘retrospective’ analyses of firm outcomes.

Learn more about the proposed integrated data framework in the recently published discussion paper.

Company websites are an important source of economic data and can be used for various scientific approaches, such as predicting firm innovativeness or examining market entry strategies. But the content of those websites changes over time, which requires a continuous monitoring to capture this (change of) information.

For this reason, the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research scrapes the content of corporate websites since 2018 in a panel format, updated every three to six months.

Find out more about the data and how you can access it on our new Mannheim Web Panel page!

Working with data involves attention to data privacy issues in order to protect the individual. But for researchers it can be very demanding to identify which privacy protection regulation is binding and under which conditions it applies to their own work as legal issues are usually not central to their area of expertise.

To offer researchers and other people working with data an entry point to understand those important privacy law issues, the BERD@BW team developed an interactive Virtual Assistant (iVA). iVA leads you with a series of questions through the regulations and provides a result based on your answers.

The first part of iVA, which examines with you if privacy protection regulations apply to your data project, was recently updated and can be accessed here: https://www.berd-bw.de/iva/ (german)

While iVA currently addresses if privacy protection regulations apply to you, we are already working on an extension to cover the issue more profoundly. We are looking forward to present you a second part of iVA, that will let you check if you are allowed to process personal data and what requirements you have to keep in mind.

Sadly, the first series of Data Literacy Snacks will soon come to an end with Renat Shigapov’s Snack on Wikibase Knowledge Graphs for Data Management & Data Science (more info) on Wednesday, 23 June, 1pm. But encouraged by the positive feedback, we are already planning to serve another Snack series.

For the new series, you can send us topics from the cosmos of research data management and data literacy, that you would like to hear more about.

Your topic suggestions for the upcoming Data Literacy Snacks series:

To stay up to date with the new series and other news around research data in Business, Economic and related areas, we recommend to subscribe to our newsletter and follow BERD@BW on Twitter.

In our BERD newsletter, we want to provide more information on events, tools, services etc. related to Business and Economic Research Data Management. Please register here if you want to receive the BERD newsletter: https://www.berd-bw.de/newsletter/

If you have any announcements or contribtions on research data management, data literacy and data science that would be interesting for the BERD community and that you would like us to share through the newsletter, please contact us.