How to Make Research Reach the Newsroom? Designing Open-Data Platforms Through Boundary Theory

Research increasingly produces openly available datasets with high societal relevance, yet such data remain difficult to reuse beyond their original scientific context. At the same time, data journalism has become an established practice that relies on openly available data to inform public debate, but rarely draws directly on research data. This study examines how open research data platforms can support journalistic reuse. Building on boundary-spanning mechanisms as a sensitizing and interpretive lens, we analyse reuse as a cross-community challenge in which data must retain meaning across scientific and journalistic contexts. Following a design science research approach, we derive design requirements from interviews with data journalists (n=6), a co-creation workshop with data journalists (n=15), and a formative ex-ante expert evaluation (n=13). The study contributes early design knowledge by showing how syntactic and semantic platform support can enable interpretive reuse across knowledge boundaries.