The importance of effective data sharing and reuse to funders and others supporting research

Abstract

Wellcome requires grantees to submit and maintain an Outputs Management Plan, the quality of which have improved over time. • To stimulate re-use of data, the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes were launched in 2018. • The Wellcome prizes did not receive the volume of submissions expected, one possible reason being the lack of clarity about the time required to produce a worthy entry.• Researchers identify publishers as the source relied upon to make data open, and there are steps publishers can take to help.• However, there is also a role for funders to unlock the potential of data.

Why academics under‐share research data: A social relational theory

“…But many disciplines have not developed sharing cultures at all. Lack of sharing, and also potentially lack of reuse (e.g., Borgman, 2015;Borgman et al, 2019) seem to typify approaches in a number of disciplines unless specifically incentivized (MacFarlane, 2022). In fact, across disciplines, researchers bound by funder or journal data accessibility mandates are surprisingly non-compliant about depositing in repositories (Wiley Market Research, 2017).…”

Data sharing practices across knowledge domains: A dynamic examination of data availability statements in PLOS ONE publications

“…As part of this trend, major funders, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, have encouraged or even mandated data sharing since the 2000s [5,6]. This has greatly promoted data sharing among researchers [4,7].…”