Data Disclosure and Data Sharing in Scientific Research

Abstract

Do the benefits of data sharing outweigh its perceived costs? This is a critical question, and one with the potential to change culture and behavior. Dai et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JG004277) examined how data sharing is related to scientific impact in the field of eddy covariance (EC) and found that data sharers are disproportionately high-impact researchers, and vice versa; they also note strong regional differences in EC data-sharing norms. The current policies and restrictions of EC journals and repositories are highly uneven. Incentivizing data sharing and enhancing computational reproducibility are critical next steps for EC, ecology, and science more broadly. Plain Language Summary The raw data that scientists generate-typically from experiments and/or observations-have traditionally been kept private, but research funders, journals, and scientists themselves are pushing for change, arguing that taxpayer-funded data should be "open" (available to all) on both moral and practical grounds. Do influential scientists share more, and does data sharing lead to higher impact? This commentary discusses a recent paper examining these issues in a particular field of ecology and earth system science. Current policies and restrictions are highly uneven, and it is critical to provide proper credit for scientists who freely share their data.

The formation of research ethics for data sharing by biological scientists: an empirical analysis

“…Sharing scientific data among researchers has been encouraged for a variety of reasons and practiced in several dimensions. Data sharing helps to promote innovation and potential new uses of data, reduces the cost of duplicating data collection, maximizes transparency and accountability of research, and provides quality assurance (Allison and Cooper, 1992;Van den Eynden et al, 2011). Several studies point out that, in the actual practice of data sharing in different scientific fields, the publication-related data and materials are not always available for other researchers.…”

Understanding the data-sharing debate in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand: a narrative review on the perspectives of funders, publishers/journals, researchers, participants and Māori collectives

“…Open science is used as an umbrella term, and data-sharing is the specific process of making raw data accessible to researchers outside those collecting the data (Allison and Cooper 1992;Rouder 2016). Nested within data-sharing is the closely related concept of data-linkage, which refers to the practice of integrating shared data from multiple sources about the same individuals, usually for the purposes of extending the initial research findings and creating a more comprehensive dataset (Harron et al 2017).…”