Making open data work for plant scientists

Abstract

Despite the clear demand for open data sharing, its implementation within plant science is still limited. This is, at least in part, because open data-sharing raises several unanswered questions and challenges to current research practices. In this commentary, some of the challenges encountered by plant researchers at the bench when generating, interpreting, and attempting to disseminate their data have been highlighted. The difficulties involved in sharing sequencing, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics data are reviewed. The benefits and drawbacks of three data-sharing venues currently available to plant scientists are identified and assessed: (i) journal publication; (ii) university repositories; and (iii) community and project-specific databases. It is concluded that community and project-specific databases are the most useful to researchers interested in effective data sharing, since these databases are explicitly created to meet the researchers’ needs, support extensive curation, and embody a heightened awareness of what it takes to make data reuseable by others. Such bottom-up and community-driven approaches need to be valued by the research community, supported by publishers, and provided with long-term sustainable support by funding bodies and government. At the same time, these databases need to be linked to generic databases where possible, in order to be discoverable to the majority of researchers and thus promote effective and efficient data sharing. As we look forward to a future that embraces open access to data and publications, it is essential that data policies, data curation, data integration, data infrastructure, and data funding are linked together so as to foster data access and research productivity.

Agricultural Researchers' Attitudes Toward Open Access and Data Sharing

“…Although multiple studies have found some evidence of correlation between shared data and higher citation counts, it either did not occur to the researchers in this study that this was a possibility, or this is not a major motivating factor for them (Drachen et al 2016;Piwowar & Vision 2013;Thelwall & Kousha 2017). Another benefit not cited by the agricultural researchers in the Ithaka S+R study is the ability to make "negative" or otherwise unpublished data available, although it has been noted by other scientists (Keil 2014;Leonelli et al 2013). For librarians, both of these advantages could be explored with agricultural researchers to determine whether they are motivators.…”

Correlation between impact factor and public availability of published research data in Information Science and Library Science journals

“…If the data are accessible and reusable, researchers can examine and generate new knowledge 1 . Today, the rapid advances in computing capabilities provide useful tools in manipulating and exploring massive data sets 2 .…”

Public availability of published research data in substance abuse journals

“…Within the traditional system of publishing research data, only a small fraction of the data is available to the public, and in addition, the selection of these data depends on the value that the authors give to the published article [2][3][4].…”