It's Good to Share: Why Environmental Scientists’ Ethics Are Out of Date

Abstract

Although there have been many recent calls for increased data sharing, the majority of environmental scientists do not make their individual data sets publicly available in online repositories. Current data-sharing conversations are focused on overcoming the technological challenges associated with data sharing and the lack of rewards and incentives for individuals to share data. We argue that the most important conversation has yet to take place: There has not been a strong ethical impetus for sharing data within the current culture, behaviors, and practices of environmental scientists. In this article, we describe a critical shift that is happening in both society and the environmental science community that makes data sharing not just good but ethically obligatory. This is a shift toward the ethical value of promoting inclusivity within and beyond science. An essential element of a truly inclusionary and democratic approach to science is to share data through publicly accessible data sets.

Sharing biodiversity data: citizen scientists’ concerns and motivations

“…Access to and sharing of citizen science data is of crucial importance: open data and data sharing with both project participants and outside parties can improve the data's relevance and trustworthiness for science, policy and management (Freitag et al 2016;Soranno et al 2015). Several practical issues regarding data sharing and use are debated in the literature, especially how to organise, validate, integrate and analyse this data (Gouveia et al 2004;Newman et al 2012;Resnik et al 2015).…”

A framework for addressing ethical issues in citizen science

“…Data sharing is a key component of ethical research (Shamoo and Resnik, 2015;Soranno et al, 2015). Data sharing allows others to build on completed work and promotes dialog, debate, and critical feedback.…”

“…Another strategy for responding to COIs in scientific research, including citizen science, is to make data publicly available after publication so that the data analysis and interpretation can be independently evaluated (Michaels, 2008;Soranno et al, 2015). Sometimes COIs are so problematic that the best strategy for dealing with them may be to avoid them altogether (Shamoo and Resnik, 2015).…”

Perspectives from a water research institute on knowledge management for sustainable water management

“…The rapidly-developing trend toward more systematic data management is a response to evolving norms in the scientific community [Fecher et al, 2015;Soranno et al, 2015], which in turn reflect both the expectations of the broader society for return on its investment in scientific research and the availability of tools for data management [Joseph, 2016]. The fact that much scientific research is publically funded underlies growing requirements for measures ranging from the specification of data availability to public data archiving [Kowalczyk and Shankar, 2011;Vines et al, 2013].…”