“The Big Data rich and the Big Data poor”: the new digital divide raises questions about future academic research

Data is being created faster than ever before. However, as Kate Metzler explains, limited access to this big data is creating a digital divide between large companies and the broader scholarly community. To compound this problem, there is also a big data analysis skills gap that further hinders the progress of social science. Without access to these datasets or the expertise to analyse them, research is confronted with a replication crisis and is vulnerable to commercial motivations.