Collaborative Data Use between Private and Public Stakeholders—A Regional Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article addresses the issue of cross-organizational data exchange drawing from a survey and a set of qualitative interviews with different types of stakeholders in the context of the project IDE@S.

The article has the aim of increasing knowledge about technical requirements, challenges and solutions for setting up data sharing/collaborations. The article addresses a relevant topic related to the establishment of data ecosystems. It also draws from the responses of different types of stakeholders involved in regional data infrastructures with the overall goal of better understanding the technical infrastructures adopted, how it changes according to the type of the stakeholder, what are the needs for technical change.

Although interesting, the following issues have to be tackled before the manuscript could be considered for publication:

• The content of the article should presented in a more structured manner. The authors should add a clear explanation of the problem(s) they wish to address already at the incipit of the abstract and of the introduction. The empirical research should be contextualised into the literature and the methodology should be explained, also taking into account the peculiarities of the participants (all from Austria, all from IDE@S project) and the limitations of the sample in terms of generalisability (only 17 institutions).
  
  
• A major issue I see is that the discussion is not really commenting the findings of the survey, therefore learning from them, but introduces new issues and concepts (value of data, iRODS, standards) without clearly explaining how they relate with the empirical research. It is also confusing in how it deals with certain topics, what is the link between education and networking (cfr. DIH) and how does this point connect with your findings? It remains implicit. The discussion only directly deals with the responses of the survey from line 245 to 258, but a reader would have expected to understand more from the results of the survey by reading the discussion. Also, in the discussion there is no mention of academic stakeholders, while these are mentioned in the abstract and their perspectives are examined in the results. The conclusions mention the “demands from the different stakeholders”(line 328), but these have been addressed only tangentially in the discussion.
  
  
• The presentation of the qualitative research is not satisfactory, as the analysis does not really provide any of the richness that is expected to obtain through in-depth interviews. From how the findings are presented, it seems they were open questions in a survey, not an individual in-depth interview.

 

Overall, I truly appreciate the effort of addressing technical requirements, limitations and needs of data ecosystems from different stakeholders drawing from empirical research. I also think there are interesting information in the article, both from the review of the literature, the questions raised and the empirical research. However, the content is not well structured in the current version of the article. The authors should work on their material and organised it in a way that it is more sound scientifically by:

• clearly stating their research goals and use those goals as a reference for structuring the article (both in terms of literature review and analysis of the findings),
• improving the description of the methods and of the findings (not leaving anything implicit),
• re-writing the discussions and conclusions so that they are truly informed by the results of the research and the literature (and do not add further content and reflections not backed up by the research).

 

 

Author Response

- We thank you for your valuable comments. We have revised the entire contribution, in regard to readability, structure and clarity of the research ideas. We have added details on the participants and a more detailed description on the methodology.

- We now directly refer to the results in the discussion and have revised all sections in terms of comprehensibility. We relate repeatedly to the overall aim (to investigate general factors influencing collaborative data use) and elaborate its connection to the topic of education.

- We have revised the methodology section for more clarity on the interview process and added further information in the subsection of the open questionnaire.

- We thank you for all of your comments and suggestions. We have made structural changes on the goals starting from title, abstract, also including introduction, methods, results, discussion up to conclusion, incorporating detailed explanations on findings and replacing some of the previous content in order not to fall out of frame.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well presented and it is easy to read and offers interesting considerations on the importance of data exchange in a regional technical infrastructure.
The introduction and the discussion sections are very well organised and contain several interesting points; anyway, the results section seems not to be well connected with the other sections and needs some adjustments, addressed in the comments below.
My main consideration on the article is anyway the fact that the title and the introduction/discussion sections don't really match the data coming from the survey and the results section.
It seems to me that the data and information collected are not answering to questions related to cross-sectoral data exchange, but more to issues related to evolution and need of modern data/technical infrastructures. Questions and answers are not focused on the exchange of data/knowledge, but on characteristics of the single organizations/companies in relation to their infrastructure.
For this reason I'd suggest to slightly modify the title towards the real content of the survey and correspondingly adapt some parts in the introduction and discussion sessions.

Minor comments

• in the references, some standardization should be done. E.g. some references have the title in italic, while others have the Journal.
• lines 65-66: "This requires that data exchange be made under data sharing agreements". I think the sentence should be "[...] is made [...]" or "takes place", instead of "be made".
• lines 66-70: are there any relevant examples of projects that can be cited here?
• line 117: "corresponding to 8 of for-profit" > "corresponding to 8 of for-profit"
• line 127: "Informed consent information were provided" > "Informed consent information was provided"
• line 128: "Data from these text documents were anonymized" > "Data from these text documents was anonymized"
• Figure 1 and 3(a): in both figures I suggest to not represent average as a bar itself, but representing it as a line perpendicular to the other 3 bars. It would in my opinion simplify the understanding of the graphs.
• line 170: "Figure 2(a)" > "Figure 2(b)"
• line 171: "is standard procedure" > "is a standard procedure"
• Figure 2(a): i don't find the pie chart really useful and a bit misleading in the choice of colors. If it is to be used, I'd suggest to use a progressively dark colour, to show the increase of storage size (GB-TB-PB).
• Figure 2(a) and 4(a): Colours can be useful (but not really needed anyway) in Figure 1 and 3(a) to characterize the 3 types of organizations, but I suggest to avoid them here. Authors might use 3-4 shades of grey.
• line 184: "need to extended their data sources" > "need to extended their data sources"
• lines 189-197. I don't see here any reference to and description of fig. 4(b). Regarding 4(a), it is not commented, nor totally clear, what the "both" option means: have the organizations answered that that infrastructure was developed partially inhouse and partially outsourced? In addition, it is only mentioned that PA answered quite differently compared to other organizations, with regards to tools and containers. If it is possible, I'd suggest to present a figure able to include also this valuable information.
• Section 3.4: the difference between quantitative and qualitative questions does not seem substantial and sharp to me. Would a differentiation between close and open questions be more useful to differentiate the 2 sections?
• Table 2: I'd suggest to transpose the table, having two rows (General standards and Practices) with the correspondent text on a second column. The current table indirectly suggests the reader some correspondence between rows (e.g. Open Source Framework and Firewall) that are not real. Also, maybe use "standards and technologies" instead of standards only, because e.g. Microsoft or Oracle are not standards. Additionally, it's not really clear the difference between "General standards" and "Practices". Please explain it better.
• lines 219-220: "demands from the staff continuing education" > "requires continuous training of staff."
• Table 3: it is not referenced in the text. The caption says "Training in demand for personnel in the data area": the sentence doesn't sound good to me. Would it be better "Demand for staff training in the data area"?
• Table 4 in not mentioned in the text. The rows in the table should be more separated to be more readable. The content of the table should be probably more extensively explained in the main text, because some items are not self explaining.
• line 238: "While there already exist several criteria to establish this value" > "While several criteria already exist to establish this value"
• line 252: "a company’s interests" > "a company’s interests"
• line 293: "supervized and unsupervized" > "supervised and unsupervised"
• reference 36: "IACOB, N.; SIMONELLI, F" shouldn't be all in capital letters
• In figures 3 and 4 it is not clear whether the items represented in the figures are all the options presented to respondents or just the most voted answers.
• in the supplemental information, it would be useful to have the survey also translated in English and to have a correspondence between questions (e.g. numbers) in the survey and the correspondent rows in the csv file for better readability

Author Response

We thank you for your thorough review of our manuscript. We have revised the entire contribution, including the title, in order to present the study subject and goals more clearly. We have made changes to all sections and now refer to the main idea of investigating general factors influencing collaborative data use.

Minor comments

• in the references, some standardization should be done. E.g. some references have the title in italic, while others have the Journal.

This is the standard layout set by Latex, provided by the MDPI template, differentiating between books and journals

• lines 65-66: "This requires that data exchange be madeunder data sharing agreements". I think the sentence should be "[...] is made [...]" or "takes place", instead of "be made".

This paragraph has been excluded to present the study concept more clearly.

• lines 66-70: are there any relevant examples of projects that can be cited here?

This paragraph has been excluded in order not to digress too far from the study’s focus.

• line 117: "corresponding to 8 of for-profit" > "corresponding to 8 of for-profit"

“of” deleted

• line 127: "Informed consent information wereprovided" > "Informed consent information was provided"

rephrased

• line 128: "Data from these text documents wereanonymized" > "Data from these text documents was anonymized"

rephrased

• Figure 1 and 3(a): in both figures I suggest to not represent average as a bar itself, but representing it as a line perpendicular to the other 3 bars. It would in my opinion simplify the understanding of the graphs.

Figures have been changed as suggested.

• line 170: "Figure 2(a)" > "Figure 2(b)"

Figures have been changed and newly referenced

• line 171: "is standard procedure" > "is astandard procedure"

article introduced

• Figure 2(a): i don't find the pie chart really useful and a bit misleading in the choice of colors. If it is to be used, I'd suggest to use a progressively dark colour, to show the increase of storage size (GB-TB-PB).

We have changed the layout as suggested.

• Figure 2(a) and 4(a): Colours can be useful (but not really needed anyway) in Figure 1 and 3(a) to characterize the 3 types of organizations, but I suggest to avoid them here. Authors might use 3-4 shades of grey.

In terms of comprehensibility, we now avoid colours as long as we do not refer to types of organization, and we always use specific colours when referring to them.

• line 184: "need to extended their data sources" > "need to extended their data sources"

rephrased

• lines 189-197. I don't see here any reference to and description of fig. 4(b). Regarding 4(a), it is not commented, nor totally clear, what the "both" option means: have the organizations answered that that infrastructure was developed partially inhouse and partially outsourced? In addition, it is only mentioned that PA answered quite differently compared to other organizations, with regards to tools and containers. If it is possible, I'd suggest to present a figure able to include also this valuable information.

We have changed the Figure and added further descriptions in the text.

• Section 3.4: the difference between quantitative and qualitative questions does not seem substantial and sharp to me. Would a differentiation between close and open questions be more useful to differentiate the 2 sections?

rephrased

• Table 2: I'd suggest to transpose the table, having two rows (General standards and Practices) with the correspondent text on a second column. The current table indirectly suggests the reader some correspondence between rows (e.g. Open Source Framework and Firewall) that are not real. Also, maybe use "standards and technologies" instead of standards only, because e.g. Microsoft or Oracle are not standards. Additionally, it's not really clear the difference between "General standards" and "Practices". Please explain it better.

Table changed and according descriptions added.

• lines 219-220: "demands from the staff continuing education" > "requires continuous training of staff."

Rephrased as suggested.

• Table 3: it is not referenced in the text. The caption says "Training in demand for personnel in the data area": the sentence doesn't sound good to me. Would it be better "Demand for staff training in the data area"?

Rephrased as suggested.

• Table 4 in not mentioned in the text. The rows in the table should be more separated to be more readable. The content of the table should be probably more extensively explained in the main text, because some items are not self explaining.

Table layout has been changed and a reference has been added to descriptions which have also been extended.

• line 238: "While there already exist several criteria to establish this value" > "While several criteria already existto establish this value"

This paragraph has been excluded in order not to digress too far from the study’s focus.

• line 252: "a company’s interests" > "a company’s interests"

rephrased

• line 293: "supervized and unsupervized" > "supervised and unsupervised"

changed

• reference 36: "IACOB, N.; SIMONELLI, F" shouldn't be all in capital letters

changed

• In figures 3 and 4 it is not clear whether the items represented in the figures are all the options presented to respondents or just the most voted answers.

We added descriptions in the subsection for clarity.

• in the supplemental information, it would be useful to have the survey also translated in English and to have a correspondence between questions (e.g. numbers) in the survey and the correspondent rows in the csv file for better readability

We have now added a document “questionnaire-english”

 

Many thanks for pointing out several issues and mistakes that lead to a decreased comprehensibility. We have revised the complete manuscript accordingly.

Reviewer 3 Report

The title is not very appealing and long.

 

The abstract needs to be revised. It has to be clearer and more objective.

The Abstract has information that is not necessary and another that is missing. The abstract must have the following logic: Purpose; Design/methodology/approach; Findings; Practical implications; originality/value

 

The introduction is incomplete. Lack:

1. Evidencing the literature GAP based on the literature
2. Purpose of the study must be clarified
3. Originality of the study
4. What are the expected results (to captivate the reader)
5. the Last paragraph should briefly describe what the reader can read in the following sections (this already has is to keep).

 

The study does not have a literature review. Point 2 has to be the literature review. I recommend that, at the beginning of the literature review, approach the Regional Innovation Networks a little and connect with the collaborative data environment (2 or 3 paragraphs)

I recommend reading and citing some studies:

- Collaborative data analytics for smart buildings: opportunities and models

- Review About Regional Development Networks: an Ecosystem Model Proposal

- Collaborative data networks for public service: governance, management, and performance

- The cardboard box study: understanding collaborative data management in the connected home

 

The methodology has to be revised. Details are required.

 

The methodology has to be justified. Should they justify the importance of using this method in this study? Advantages disadvantages? Support with literature. Why did you use this method and not another? Where, how, and when was the data collected?

Did you use a semi-structured questionnaire?

Has the questionnaire been previously applied in any study? If not, how did you validate the questionnaire?

 

Interviews were conducted with 9 NFPO's, but they mentioned nothing previously about the NFPO. When reviewing the literature, the FPO and NFPO must be addressed. See previously suggested studies.

 

When did the interviews apply?

When were the interviews done?

The average duration of interviews?

Who responded within organizations?

I recommend making a table with data from the organizations that participated in the study (do not put the name). Example: what do they sell? Years that are on the market? Billing volume? The number of workers? The number of partnerships? Ect…

 

They have some information in the following sections that they can use to complement the methodology.

 

The results are adequate.

 

But in discussing the results, the authors need to further confront the results of the present study with the literature.

 

The conclusion needs to be developed. I suggest the following order of ideas for the conclusion:

1. Remember the purpose of the study
2. Main findings
3. Theoretical implications
4. Practical implications
5. Social implications
6. Originality of the study
7. Limitations of the study
8. Future lines of research

 

The study has few references published in 2020/2021. Cite a few more recently published (see suggestion to articles made earlier).

 

English needs to be revised as there are grammatical problems.

 

Good luck to the authors with the publication.

Author Response

- We thank you for your careful review and very valuable suggestions. We have revised the entire manuscript, including the title, in regard to readability, structure and clarity of the research ideas. We have rewritten the introductory section, which also represents the literature review. We have included your suggestions and further timely references while elaborating on the study purpose, originality and open questions, structure, and added transitions between subsections.

- We revised the methodology section and added several details also regarding the validation process. Descriptions on FPOs and NFPOs have been incorporated in the literature review as noted above.

- We now include additional information on time and dates of interviews and some peculiarities of participants in the methodology section.

- We have added several Figures to give a clearer picture and a summary of participants involved in the study, as far as possible not to de-anonymize respondents.

- We now (1) discuss results in more detail, and (2) we have excluded some paragraphs in order to present the study concept more clearly and to avoid digressing too far from the intended focus.

- We have revised the conclusion as suggested.

- We have added several timely references when extending the introduction and revising all sections.

- We have revised the full manuscript accordingly.

- Many thanks to the reviewer for the valuable and constructive comments and feedback.

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper aims to discuss the challenges and perspectives of the regional technical infrastructure for cross-organizational data exchange from heterogeneous sources between multiple stakeholders, on the example of public and private organizations in the Austrian federal state of Styria. The paper is well written, with interesting research results and discussion.

There are several concerns regarding this paper.

First, the paper's goal and methodology are not fully coherent. More specifically, the introduction and discussion are written as the research aims to discuss the challenges between public and private organizations, while the methodology and results are strongly mostly to the technical aspects, namely: present technical resources and challenges, changes in technical infrastructure over the recent years, and others. In line with that, the paper's goal should be more specific (Lines 107-109). The phrase "in any of the areas considered "should be replaced with a more specific goal. It would be useful to pose clear research questions in the introduction.

Second, the methodology is elaborated with very little detail. The methodology should have four sections: Background, Procedure, Participants, and Analysis. Please consider this paper as an example of the similar methodology used for the qualitative research: Jerman, Andrej, Mirjana Pejić Bach, and Ana Aleksić. "Transformation towards smart factory system: Examining new job profiles and competencies." Systems Research and Behavioral Science 37, no. 2 (2020): 388-402. It is unclear how many respondents are from academia and other non-profit groups (Line 122-123). The research instrument should be presented in the methodology or the appendix since results indicate a quantitative part of the paper and guide in-depth interviews.

Third, results should be presented consistently. The material in the results should be presented in a manner that allows a clearer relationship of the presented findings with the discussion. Chapter 3.1 presents only descriptive comments of Figure 1, nicely structured around FPOs, PA, and academia. Chapter 3.2, on the other hand, does not provide a clear distinction between the three groups analyzed. More details should be provided on some elements, e.g., big data and AI. Chapter 3.3. again provides very little information about three different groups and then general information about the need for more resources. Chapter 3.4. provides only technical information, which is well-known, while it lacks the distinction between the three groups again.

Third, the discussion should be more structured.  If authors decide to pose clear research questions, the discussion could be structured around these questions. There should be a structured list of the practical implications of the research. The main problem is that the discussion is written to discuss private and public organizations. At the same time, the result chapter provides mainly results for all respondents in bulk, without the distinction between groups examined.

The conclusion section must have a subsection on limitations and future research directions (one to two pages).

Authors should reconsider explaining the section about the scientific contribution in the introduction and the conclusion part of the paper, with the structured comparison of the current research with previous research. The text can be one paragraph long, but it should contain the most important studies.

Author Response

- Thank you for your valuable comments and suggestions for structural changes. We restructured the entire manuscript for the sake of clarity. We extended subsections and included additional results also regarding challenges between public and private organizations, as well as a change of the title to better communicate the study’s aims.

- We revised the methodology section, included a substructure, extended descriptions and added details on participants.

- We now included additional results and details on the three groups of FPOs, PA and academia. We further extended descriptions and included more details of responses from the open questionnaire.

- We have now restructured and revised the complete discussion to ensure that it addresses the topics in line with the structure of results. This structure of factors that influence collaborative data use is presented already in the introduction, and is repeated for comprehensibility throughout the whole manuscript.

- We included statements on limitations and future research.

- We included several statements explaining our study aim, in particular in the introduction, which is also the main source of references and represents the literature review.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The article has been improved and the authors have worked to introduce the requested changes. Upon the introduction of minor revisions, it could be ready to be published.

The article still presents some weakness and has aspects to improve so, upon discretion of the authors, I would suggest to:

• Check whether "interview survey" is the correct wording for the method used. I would recommend to check between "interview study" or just "survey" as they are two different methods
• Provide more sources/reference to support general statements such as the first sentence
• Avoid policy jargon (e.g. "boost", "selling points")
• Check if sections highlighted in yellow of the attached file are correct/should be backed up by literature/refer to the correct concept
• The 7 topics addressed in the survey could be better introduced
• The open questionnaire's findings seem to be the result of a survey with close questions (e.g. the preferred standards used), it is not clear what has been the advantaged of using open questions and what did you learn about the attitudes of the respondents. It is also unusual to have percentages in relation to findings from qualitative interviews.
• Table 3 "comments" is not specific
• Further references could be added on data ecosystems and data sharing by public and private actors, such as the following:   - Susha, I., Janssen, M., & Verhulst, S. (2017). Data Collaboratives as a New Frontier of Cross-Sector Partnerships in the Age of Open Data: Taxonomy Development. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2017 (HICSS-50). Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-50/eg/open_data_in_government/4 - Martin, S., Gautier, P., Turki, S. and Kotsev, A., Establishment of Sustainable Data Ecosystems: Recommendations for the evolution of spatial data infrastructures, EUR 30626 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021 - Craglia, M., Scholten, H.J., Micheli, M., Hradec, J., Calzada, I., Luitjens, S., Ponti, M. and Boter, J., Digitranscope: The governance of digitally-transformed society, EUR 30590 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021 - Susha, I., & Gil-Garcia, J. R. (2019, January 8). A Collaborative Governance Approach to Partnerships Addressing Public Problems with Private Data. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2019.350 - Klievink, B., Romijn, B.-J., Cunningham, S., & de Bruijn, H. (2017). Big data in the public sector: Uncertainties and readiness. Information Systems Frontiers, 19(2), 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-016-9686-2

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

> We are again grateful for your thorough review improving our manuscript! Beneath, our point-to-point response:

Check whether "interview survey" is the correct wording for the method used. I would recommend to check between "interview study" or just "survey" as they are two different methods

> Thank you for this remark, we changed phrasings accordingly. 

Provide more sources/reference to support general statements such as the first sentence

> Thank you for this remark, we added references and we generally added an own section as literature survey. 

Avoid policy jargon (e.g. "boost", "selling points")

> Thank you for this remark, we subsituted wordings accordingly. 

Check if sections highlighted in yellow of the attached file are correct/should be backed up by literature/refer to the correct concept

> We added several references and corrected language issues.

The 7 topics addressed in the survey could be better introduced

> We revised the subsection of introducing survey questions and skipped the listing.

The open questionnaire's findings seem to be the result of a survey with close questions (e.g. the preferred standards used), it is not clear what has been the advantaged of using open questions and what did you learn about the attitudes of the respondents. It is also unusual to have percentages in relation to findings from qualitative interviews.

> We revised the description of the open questionnaire and now refer to open questions with a clarifying example.

Table 3 "comments" is not specific

> We changed the wording.

Further references could be added on data ecosystems and data sharing by public and private actors, such as the following:  

- Susha, I., Janssen, M., & Verhulst, S. (2017). Data Collaboratives as a New Frontier of Cross-Sector Partnerships in the Age of Open Data: Taxonomy Development. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2017 (HICSS-50). Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-50/eg/open_data_in_government/4

- Martin, S., Gautier, P., Turki, S. and Kotsev, A., Establishment of Sustainable Data Ecosystems: Recommendations for the evolution of spatial data infrastructures, EUR 30626 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021

- Craglia, M., Scholten, H.J., Micheli, M., Hradec, J., Calzada, I., Luitjens, S., Ponti, M. and Boter, J., Digitranscope: The governance of digitally-transformed society, EUR 30590 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021

- Susha, I., & Gil-Garcia, J. R. (2019, January 8). A Collaborative Governance Approach to Partnerships Addressing Public Problems with Private Data. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2019.350

- Klievink, B., Romijn, B.-J., Cunningham, S., & de Bruijn, H. (2017). Big data in the public sector: Uncertainties and readiness. Information Systems Frontiers, 19(2), 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-016-9686-2

> Thank you for these additions to substantiate ideas and the underlying background. They have been included in the literature survey section.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been slightly revised and refocused (in the title and in the content)  with some useful additions and clarifications that has improved it.

Below some minor suggestions/requirements to be corrected before publication:

Through the paper is not always easy to link the figures with the corresponding question from the questionnaire. I suggest to add in the caption of the figures the correspondent number of question as numbered in the supplemental material. For better readability, I'd also suggesto to reorder the questions in the CSV file containing the answers in the same order of the original questionnaire.

* line 1: "Research and development is facilitated" > "Research and development are facilitated"
* lines 2-5: "Until now, most companies and organizations have produced and collected all types of data stored in data silos, but these sources still have to be integrated with one another in order to enable knowledge creation." This sentence doesn't sound good to me and I suggest this minor rephrase: "Until now, most companies and organizations have produced and collected various types of data, and stored them in data silos that still have to be integrated with one another in order to enable knowledge creation."
* lines 24-30: the sentence is not very clear to me and it should be rephrased. Here my suggestion: "Many actors in the academic world and in a large number of industrial sectors are aware of the importance of the exchange of open and well-documented high-quality data supported by reliable and effective data services [5] for knowledge transfer and to boost innovation and introduce new business models [6,7]. Anyway, a number of factors of cultural, ethical, financial, legal, and technical nature [2–4] hinder the exploitation of its full advantages."
* lines 59-60: why the authors are using "persistent" as synonym of "shared"?
* lines 73-74: "which is creating federated and The establishment". Some words are missing here. GAIA-X information seems to be duplicated here and in the following sentences.
* lines 111-112: "expected evolution of the technical infrastructure". Should it be "their technical infrastructure" or an ideal/optimal infrastructure?
* lines 115-117: the details and versions of the videoconferencing tool and cloud server seem irrelevant here.
* lines 158-159: the sentence "We separate for convenience academic institutions from other public administration (PA) organizations in two different sub-groups." seems to be redundant after the introduction on the previous sentence.
* Figure 3: this figure is very difficult to read to me. It's not clear to understand how colors are graded: to me it would be logical to have darker colors with bigger storage size. In addition, in FPO and PA there's a gap between classes "1-100 TB" and "> 1 PB".
* Figure 6: for better readability, I suggest to reorder the legend having PA on top, then academia and FPO, to reflect the same order in the graph. Same thing (left to right) in Figure 5a
* line 239: I think the openness in the title of the section would be better referred to the questions than to the questionnaire itself. 
* lines 240-241: for the same reason, I suggest to rephrase "the open questionnaire contained qualitative questions" into "the questionnaire also contained open question (i.e. allowing free text answers)"
* line 255: "and the variations on it" > "and its variations"
* line 258: "Git, SAP" > "Git and SAP"
* lines 284-289: the sentence seems to be missing a verb. I suggest to add "we can mention" just before "the existence of open data policies [...]"
* line 288: "initiatives?" > "initiatives"
* line 291: "was mentioned in regard" > "was mentioned with regard"
* lines 308-315: in the sentence, I suggest to separate the 3 main messages using semicolons and not dots
* line 327: "point at two hindering factors to data exchange" > "point to two hindering factors data exchange"
* line 330: "willingness" > "the willingness"

Author Response

Thank you for your suggestions and repeated time spent for revision to increase the quality of our manuscript. Beneath our point-to-point response:

Through the paper is not always easy to link the figures with the corresponding question from the questionnaire. I suggest to add in the caption of the figures the correspondent number of question as numbered in the supplemental material. For better readability, I'd also suggesto to reorder the questions in the CSV file containing the answers in the same order of the original questionnaire.

> We referenced questions of the interview-guide in Figure captions, as suggested. We reordered the CSV accordingly. (The previous order had been related to Figure occurence in the manuscript)

* line 1: "Research and development is facilitated" > "Research and development are facilitated"
* lines 2-5: "Until now, most companies and organizations have produced and collected all types of data stored in data silos, but these sources still have to be integrated with one another in order to enable knowledge creation." This sentence doesn't sound good to me and I suggest this minor rephrase: "Until now, most companies and organizations have produced and collected various types of data, and stored them in data silos that still have to be integrated with one another in order to enable knowledge creation."
* lines 24-30: the sentence is not very clear to me and it should be rephrased. Here my suggestion: "Many actors in the academic world and in a large number of industrial sectors are aware of the importance of the exchange of open and well-documented high-quality data supported by reliable and effective data services [5] for knowledge transfer and to boost innovation and introduce new business models [6,7]. Anyway, a number of factors of cultural, ethical, financial, legal, and technical nature [2–4] hinder the exploitation of its full advantages."
* lines 59-60: why the authors are using "persistent" as synonym of "shared"?
* lines 73-74: "which is creating federated and The establishment". Some words are missing here. GAIA-X information seems to be duplicated here and in the following sentences.
* lines 111-112: "expected evolution of the technical infrastructure". Should it be "their technical infrastructure" or an ideal/optimal infrastructure?
* lines 115-117: the details and versions of the videoconferencing tool and cloud server seem irrelevant here.
* lines 158-159: the sentence "We separate for convenience academic institutions from other public administration (PA) organizations in two different sub-groups." seems to be redundant after the introduction on the previous sentence.
* Figure 3: this figure is very difficult to read to me. It's not clear to understand how colors are graded: to me it would be logical to have darker colors with bigger storage size. In addition, in FPO and PA there's a gap between classes "1-100 TB" and "> 1 PB".
* Figure 6: for better readability, I suggest to reorder the legend having PA on top, then academia and FPO, to reflect the same order in the graph. Same thing (left to right) in Figure 5a
* line 239: I think the openness in the title of the section would be better referred to the questions than to the questionnaire itself. 
* lines 240-241: for the same reason, I suggest to rephrase "the open questionnaire contained qualitative questions" into "the questionnaire also contained open question (i.e. allowing free text answers)"
* line 255: "and the variations on it" > "and its variations"
* line 258: "Git, SAP" > "Git and SAP"
* lines 284-289: the sentence seems to be missing a verb. I suggest to add "we can mention" just before "the existence of open data policies [...]"
* line 288: "initiatives?" > "initiatives"
* line 291: "was mentioned in regard" > "was mentioned with regard"
* lines 308-315: in the sentence, I suggest to separate the 3 main messages using semicolons and not dots
* line 327: "point at two hindering factors to data exchange" > "point to two hindering factors data exchange"
* line 330: "willingness" > "the willingness"

> We checked and revised all points, and some additional information has been left, not in terms of comprehensibility but in regard to completeness.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors generally followed the suggestions. But it remains to review the literature review and conclusion.
The literature review must be separated into a section and must be section 2. “2. literature review". I recommend that the literature review has 1000 to 1500 words. The study is a little short. Developing the literature review gets more robust.
In my opinion the conclusion needs to be developed further. Check that you do not have everything that was suggested to put in the conclusion earlier. I suggest the following order of ideas for the conclusion:
1. Remember the purpose of the study
2. Main findings
3. Theoretical implications
4. Practical implications
5. Social implications
6. Originality of the study
7. Limitations of the study
8. Future lines of research

English still needs to be revised.

Good luck to the authors with the publication!

Author Response

Thank you again for your time to review our manuscript! Beneath our point-to-point response:

The literature review must be separated into a section and must be section 2...

> We now included an own section of Literature review next to the Introduction and added further information and references to substantiate background information and back up our ideas.

In my opinion the conclusion needs to be developed further. Check that you do not have everything that was suggested to put in the conclusion earlier. I suggest the following order of ideas for the conclusion:
1. Remember the purpose of the study
2. Main findings
3. Theoretical implications
4. Practical implications
5. Social implications
6. Originality of the study
7. Limitations of the study
8. Future lines of research

> We revised the conclusion, and in terms of clarity, we now highlight every single point mentioned by you, as it has been summarized in the conclusion before. We still try to keep this section compact!

English still needs to be revised.

> We again revised all sections, corrected typos and reformulated several phrases and wordings.

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper is now substantially improved and could be accepted for publication, to my oppinion.

Author Response

Again, thank you for your review of our manuscript. We hope to offer value to the scientific community.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The requested integrations have been considered in the revised manuscript, so I consider it ready to be accepted.

Author Response

Thank you again for your time!

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors improved the paper as suggested. In my opinion it can be accepted for publication.

Congratulations!

Author Response

Thank you again for your time!