Research Data Management : Data Sharing: Data sharing essentials
Why share your data?
Studies show that research papers receive between 9-69% more citations when they have their underlying data publicly available 1,2. Sharing data also contributes to expanding your research network, raising your research profile in your scientific community, connecting you with potential new collaborators and promoting new research, helping you reach a wider audience and establishing links with the next generations of researchers. Sharing data prevents costly duplications of scientific efforts, supports reproducibility of research findings, enhances research integrity and promotes open scientific inquiry.
Either you are considering your personal advancement or that of science and the public good, there are several arguments you can relate to in this short video "Sharing data: good for science, good for you", produced by DANSDataArchiving.
Publishers' data policies and recommended repositories
Data sharing expectations are increasingly expressed by publishers of scientific journals. Authors are required to comply with "Data availability statements" for all data underpinning the research findings put forward in an article as part of the review process and to support reproducibility.
There is a variety in the ways data are expected to be made publicly available3 :
- on demand to readers' requests
- within the article either as part of it or as supplementary material
- in a trusted data repository, institutional or subject specific which is usually part of a list of recommended ones by the publisher
Many publishers have also integrated their article submission workflow with data repositories, such as Dryad or Figshare, to facilitate authors in sharing their data during publication and to ensure authors can receive credit for the output through a data-specific persistent identifier, such as a DOI (e.g. provided by DataCite) or URI (such as that provided by the EMBL-EBI’s MIRIAM Registry).
Here is a list with links to publishers' data sharing policies4 commonly directing to list of recommended repositories (the list does not intend to be comprehensive):
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)– Data Policy
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - Editorial policies
- Elsevier – Research Data
- Nature – Availability of data and material and methods, Nature's Scientific Data Recommended Repositories
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Data Availability of Journal of Heredity
- Data Archiving of Journal of Plankton Research
- PLOS – Data Availability
- Royal Society of Chemistry – Experimental Data & Data Policy
- Science – Data and materials availability
- Taylor & Francis – Enhancing your article with supplemental material
- Wiley
- Policy on Data Archiving of Molecular Ecology
- Data Archiving of Functional Ecology (published on behalf of the British Ecological Society)
References and additional resources
1. Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007) Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE 2(3): e308. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000308
2. Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1:e175 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175.
3. Publisher data sharing policies. (2017, February 3). Retrieved February 4, 2018, from http://acm.internationalscienceediting.com/publisher-data-sharing-policies/
4.What should be included in a Publisher Data Policy? · THOR Project. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2018, from https://project-thor.readme.io/docs/publisher-data-policies
Data Archiving Essentials Training
We offer periodic trainings about data sharing and archiving. Check the calendar at https://kaust.libcal.com/calendar/workshops to see if there is one coming soon.
How not to share your data
Think about what you need when you want to use other researchers' data when you decide on how to manage and share your own. This short video "Data Sharing and Management Snafu in 3 Short Acts", produced by Karen Hanson, Alisa Surkis and Karen Yacobucci in NYU Libraries, is about a data management horror story you would like to avoid.
What do researchers say about sharing data?
To get a short but global perspective on the issue, watch these two short videos published by the Odum Institute: