Insights into European research funder Open policies and practices

Fosci, Mattia; Richens, Emma; Johnson, Rob

doi:10.5281/zenodo.3401278

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Leading German funding agencies like the DFG or the BMBF already have data sharing policies in a broad sense of the term, but they are not yet as explicit as the ones of leading international funders, which tend to have more comprehensive data sharing policies. These observations support other reports on different stages of policy development among funding agencies [ 35 , 39 , 42 – 43 , 71 , 72 ] and are particularly noteworthy for two reasons. First, our interviews indicate that smaller agencies orient themselves on the policy approaches of large funders like the BMBF and especially the DFG with its Code of Conduct.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…However, our interviewees also reported various barriers to incentivising data sharing known from other studies [35,39,43,44,47,72,81]. These include internal disagreements within funding agencies with regard to introducing new evaluation metrics that consider data sharing more strongly or convincing grant reviewers of applying those new evaluation metrics.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 88%

“…The question arises: why could this the be case? Some studies already indicate that funders face challenges and have room for improvement when it comes to implementing and designing data sharing policies [25,35,39,[43][44][45][46][47][48]. Crucially, however, German funders' perceptions themselves remain widely underexplored even in literature on funding arrangements in Germany [25,42,[48][49][50][51][52][53], let alone their perceptions of data sharing policies in Germany.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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German funders’ data sharing policies—A qualitative interview study

Anger,

Wendelborn,

Schickhardt

2024

PLoS ONE

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Background Data sharing is commonly seen as beneficial for science but is not yet common practice. Research funding agencies are known to play a key role in promoting data sharing, but German funders’ data sharing policies appear to lag behind in international comparison. This study aims to answer the question of how German data sharing experts inside and outside funding agencies perceive and evaluate German funders’ data sharing policies and overall efforts to promote data sharing. Methods This study is based on sixteen guided expert interviews with representatives of German funders and German research data experts from stakeholder organisations, who shared their perceptions of German’ funders efforts to promote data sharing. By applying the method of qualitative content analysis to our interview data, we categorise and describe noteworthy aspects of the German data sharing policy landscape and illustrate our findings with interview passages. Results We present our findings in five sections to distinguish our interviewees’ perceptions on a) the status quo of German funders’ data sharing policies, b) the role of funders in promoting data sharing, c) current and potential measures by funders to promote data sharing, d) general barriers to those measures, and e) the implementation of more binding data sharing requirements. Discussion and conclusion Although funders are perceived to be important promoters and facilitators of data sharing throughout our interviews, only few German funding agencies have data sharing policies in place. Several interviewees stated that funders could do more, for example by providing incentives for data sharing or by introducing more concrete policies. Our interviews suggest the academic freedom of grantees is widely perceived as an obstacle for German funders in introducing mandatory data sharing requirements. However, some interviewees stated that stricter data sharing requirements could be justified if data sharing is a part of good scientific practice.

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