The Door to Data Sharing is Slowly Creaking Open
Following August’s announcement bythe White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to extend public access to government-funded research in the US, progress towards open access, open data, and open science as a whole has perhaps never felt more tangible for those working in scholarly communications. But to what extent are researchers at the center of this transition embracing this change, specifically around data sharing? And how does this differ across different generations of researchers, nationalities, and funders?
As therecent Scholarly Kitchen post by Dylan Ruediger highlighted, data sharing practices were largely ignored in the ensuing commentary following the OSTP announcement. Since 2016, Digital Science (full disclosure, my employer) company Figshare— a data and paper repository provider – together withSpringer Nature, have distributed a survey to thousands of researchers globally to try and understand open data sharing and what they do with their own and with others’ data. The results of the 2022 survey were released on October 13th [DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.21276984], with over 5,400 respondents — the largest number since 2019.
The headline from the 2022 survey is that researchers are moving towards open data… but slowly. It is apparent that huge challenges and misunderstandings remain for all researchers, where knowledge on initiatives such as FAIR data is patchy and incentives for data sharing are often misaligned to researchers’ motivations. Indeed, perhaps most worrying of all is the finding that data management activities as a whole appear to be at a relatively low level.
For publishers, and the wider scientific communications community, there are a number of specific takeaways that will have a direct influence on strategy development over the next few years as the impact of the OSTP memo plays out, and other initiatives such as Plan S become more embedded:
In relation to open access (OA), respondents were most supportive of making research articles OA as a common scholarly practice (88% agreeing) and least agreeable with making preprinting a common scholarly practice (58%); almost four in five were in agreement that making research data openly available should be common practice The main circumstances that would motivate respondents to share their data openly are citation of their research papers with two thirds selecting this option, increased impact and visibility of their papers, some form of public benefit, and journal/publisher mandates followed close behind Data sharing builds trust in the quality of research. Almost two-thirds of respondents wrote that the primary way that they themselves benefited from other researchers sharing data was to validate findings Just over half of respondents had at least some understanding of data management plans, but considering that nearly three-quarters of respondents are sharing their data during publication, it may be possible to make that data sharing activity more impactful with training and awareness efforts around data management planning With nearly three-quarters (71%) of researchers still primarily keeping data on their personal hard drives, data loss due to insufficient infrastructure or use of that infrastructure remains a concern. A third of respondents use personal cloud storage.
