Sharing and reusing research data has long been recognised to have significant potential public benefit, but this is challenged by the difficulty of locating and accessing datasets. This report explores the implications, challenges and opportunities of a platform for archiving and sharing qualitative research data.

The Coordinated Access to Data, Research, and Environments (CADRE) project, led by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), aims to address this issue through the creation of a shared access management platform which operationalises the widely used ‘Five Safes’ model of sensitive data governance.

This report explores the implications of the CADRE platform for qualitative data, an area which receives far less attention in data sharing research, frameworks and infrastructure development but also offers significant potential for reuse and methodological experimentation.

It considers epistemological and ethical questions concerning the merits and challenges of archiving qualitative data; concerns relating to infrastructure, governance, and data ownership; and the practical and technical issues researchers confront in archiving their own projects and accessing others, pointing towards four primary findings.

• First, although archiving and sharing qualitative research data is acknowledged as ethically and epistemologically complex, researchers in the qualitative social sciences are not opposed to this in principle and see value in carefully thinking through how this can be done well.
• Second, the 'Five Safes' is a useful framework for supporting the archiving and sharing of qualitative research data but on its own it situates decisions in a risk-oriented framework which leaves less scope to consider data utility and value.
• Third, resourcing is a critical issue and, despite in-principle support for the idea of qualitative data archiving and sharing, there is far less willingness from researchers working in the qualitative social sciences to engage in the amount of work and funding required to do this well.
• Finally, the benefits of the CADRE platform for qualitative research are restricted without the inclusion of more extensive and appropriate metadata to aid researchers trying to identify relevant datasets.