Why share research data?
Why should I consider sharing research data that I collect, create or collate in the course of my research? Are there legitimate reasons not to share?
Reasons to share
- Scientific integrity - publishing your data and citing its location in published research papers can allow others to replicate, validate, or correct your results, thereby improving the scientific record.
- Publicly funded research - there is a growing movement for making publicly funded research available to the public, as indicated for example, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding.
- Funding mandates - UK research councils are increasingly mandating data sharing so as to avoid duplication of effort and save costs.
- The University of Edinburgh's mission - "the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge" implies transparency about the research that is conducted in its name.
- Increase the impact of your research - those who make use of your data and cite it in their own research will help to increase your impact within your field and beyond it. Users of your data may include those in other disciplines, sectors, and countries.
- Preserve your data for your own future use - by preparing your data for sharing with others, you will benefit by being able to identify, retrieve, and understand the data yourself after you have lost familiarity with it, perhaps several years hence.
- Teaching purposes - your data may be ideal for students to learn how to collect and analyse similar types of data themselves.
Reasons not to share
If your data has financial value or is the basis for potentially valuable patents that could be exploited by the University, it may be unwise to share it, even with a data license or terms and conditions attached.
Edinburgh Research and Innovation (ERI) can assist you in determining the value of your research data for these purposes.
If the data contains sensitive, personal information about human subjects, it may violate the Data Protection Act, ethics codes, or your own written consent forms to share it, even with other researchers.
Often there are ways to anonymise the data to remove the personally identifying information from it, thus making it sharable as a public use dataset.
If parts of the data are owned by others, such as commercial entities or authors, then even if you have derived wholly new data from the original sources you may not have the rights to share the data with others.
By writing a data management plan near the beginning of your research project, you can work through these issues and determine if you will be able to produce a version of your data that can be shared with others.
This article was published on Jun 20, 2011