Pulling out all the stops: Negotiating openness and data power
1. October 2025
Access to administrative and registry data is considered a key resource for independent research and evidence-based policy-making. However, growing authoritarian tendencies show how fragile this access is: extreme policies change how data is made available, controlled and used – and call into question achievements that have long been fought for in science and politics.
The Austrian Micro Data Center (AMDC), founded in 2022, was an important step towards making government-held microdata accessible for research. Based on an interview study with experts and supplementary document analysis, I show how the boundaries between science, administration and politics are being re-institutionalized. Tensions between access, independence and control become visible – and how much the sustainable use of such infrastructures depends on the appreciation of the often invisible data work that makes them possible in the first place.
The presentation is based on my chapter in the anthology Un/locking public sector data: contesting social, economic and environmental values (ed. by Angela Daly & Esperanza Miyake, 2026). It is also an invitation to a discussion: Where do we stand in Austria today – and what priorities need to be set in order to secure public data as a democratic resource in the long term?
Resources
Un/locking public sector data: contesting social, economic and environmental values, edited by Angela Daly & Esperanza Miyake, to be published by Scottish University Press in 2026
Katja Mayer’s slides will be permanently available here following her SIP Talk.
Katja Mayer
Katja Mayer is a sociologist and senior scientist at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as at the Center for Social Innovation ZSI. Her research investigates how open science and open data are changing research practices, with a particular focus on computational social sciences, citizen science and artificial intelligence. Previously, she worked as a research advisor for the President of the European Research Council and at the Technical University of Munich in the field of computational social sciences. She is a member of the Digital Humanism Strategy Advisory Board, was a co-designer of national open science strategies and was an Open Science Fellow of the Berlin University Alliance. In research, teaching and policy advice, she is committed to understanding openness as a political project that renegotiates questions of access, responsibility and public value.
