Workshop on Developing Research Transparency Guidelines in Human-centered Privacy and Security (Transparency @ SOUPS'25)

This SOUPS workshop aims to discuss and jointly develop guidelines for transparent research reporting in the human-centered privacy and security community. Transparent research reporting, i.e., providing sufficient study and analysis details in a research paper, is fundamental to good scientific practice, as it allows others to review and assess findings reliably, facilitates replication, and provides context on results and their validity. So far, the SOUPS community lacks comprehensive research reporting and transparency guidelines. The workshop's outcome will be draft guidelines that will then be shared with the larger community for further input and feedback, before being published, likely by the end of 2025.

This full day workshop starts with a short introduction to transparent research reporting, position talks, and a panel discussion, before we work in small groups (in an area of your expertise, ~5-6 persons each) to discuss and develop transparency and reporting guidelines. There will be time for exchange and networking during the coffee and lunch breaks.

Workshop

The workshop will feature a panel discussion, short talks, and mainly interactive breakout sessions to provide an opportunity for smaller groups to facilitate in-depth discussions and working on transparency guidelines for our community. Apart from that, the program includes several breaks for general discussions of the topic and networking.

We think that direct participation and input from the community is crucial to develop meaningful guidelines. In a recent paper, one participant fittingly summarized this:

“I think what’s more important is the community deciding what these norms should be and why and then making sure that people are following that and encouraging without necessarily browbeating people.”

Registration

Please make sure to register for the SOUPS workshops at the official website.

Besides that, we would appreciate if you could informally register via this form TODO as well. This gives us an overview of how plans to attend the workshop. Moreover, we will use the email addresses to send you information and updates before the workshop. Thanks!

Agenda

Sunday, August 10, 2025, 9:00 AM – 4:45 PM (Pacific Daylight Time)

Call for Participation

This workshop does not solicit contributions in the usual format of papers. Instead, this workshop will be interactive, e.g., working in small breakout groups. You can contribute to the workshop in several ways:

Attend the Workshop

We encourage all researchers from our community to participate and attend the workshop. All kind of researchers are welcome, regardless of whether they are faculty, early PhD students, or working in industry, etc. We would love, if everyone engages in the discussions at the workshop, e.g., in the small breakout groups.

Before the workshop, you can already take a look at our preliminary guideline draft that is the starting point for developing the guidelines.

Join us as Panelist

For the panel discussion, we invite researchers to to participate as panelists. The idea is to have a panel of up to 5 researchers, moderated by Sascha Fahl/Florian Schaub, and discuss opinions, experiences, and different perspectives on transparency and research reporting.

Please drop us a short email before June 30, 2025, 23:59 AoE at transparency-at-soups@sec.uni-hannover.de if you want to volunteer to join the panel.

Give a Short Talk

As a general intro to the topic and to kick-off the panel discussion, we would love to hear some short talks from members of the community. Therefore, we invite researchers to give such a talk. You can talk about any topic that you like related to transparency and research reporting, e.g., your opinion and perspective, current problems in the field, possible solutions, how you approach transparency.

The talk should not be longer than 5 minutes. You do not have to prepare slides, but you can if you want to.

Please drop us a short email before June 30, 2025, 23:59 AoE at transparency-at-soups@sec.uni-hannover.de if you want to give a short talk. Please include a title that briefly describes the topic of your talk.

Submission

As stated above, this workshop does not solicit paper contributions. Therefore, there is also no typical submission necessary.

If you want to contribute as a panelist or giving a short talk, please drop us a short mail at transparency-at-soups@sec.uni-hannover.de.

Organization

Please contact transparency-at-soups@sec.uni-hannover.de with any questions regarding this workshop.

Organizing Committee

• Sascha Fahl, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, fahl@cispa.de
• Florian Schaub, University of Michigan, fschaub@umich.edu
• Jan H. Klemmer, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, jan.klemmer@cispa.de
• Juliane Schmüser, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, juliane.schmueser@cispa.de
• Byron M. Lowens, Indiana University Indianapolis, bylowe@iu.edu
• Jan-Ulrich Holtgrave, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, jan-ulrich.holtgrave@cispa.de
• Jacques Suray, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, jacques.suray@cispa.de

Literature

If you are interested in the topic, and want further information, we can recommend the following literature — based on which the idea of this workshop was born.

• Jan H. Klemmer, Juliane Schmüser, Byron M. Lowens, Fabian Fischer, Lea Schmüser, Florian Schaub and Sascha Fahl. “Transparency in Usable Privacy and Security Research: Scholars’ Perspectives, Practices, and Recommendations” In: 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE S&P 2025, May 12-15, 2025. (Interviews on transparency in the UPS community.)
• Ayako A. Hasegawa, Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama. “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” In: Proc. 33rd USENIX Security Symposium, August 14–16, 2024, Philadelphia, PA, USA. USENIX, 2024. (Outlines shortcomings in reporting demographics.)