Considerations for Research Data Sharing Setting the Stage for Greater Openness

Abstract

In a collaborative, computationally powerful research environment, data sharing holds tremendous promise. Openly available data sets that are well documented with clear rights statements attached allow secondary users to ask new questions of extant data, leading to new discoveries and increased scientific progress. Open research data increases transparency and makes the results of research replicable and verifiable. Funding agencies, wanting to increase the value of their scientific investments, are pressing researchers to make the results of publicly funded research publicly available. IT companies developing research-based products want to promote their discoveries through reproducible experiments using open research data. Underneath the much-heralded promises of research data sharing, however, lie numerous considerations that impact or hinder research data sharing as a common practice. In this paper we explore some of the topics that institutions and researchers should consider as they encourage and enable research data sharing.