Data Archiving and Networked Services

DANS is an institute of KNAW en NWO

Data Archiving and Networked Services

Seven common objections to data sharing… and how to overcome them

Peter Doorn, director DANS

To share or not to share...

What is in it for the researcher? Benefits:• Visibility• Citation: researchers who share data are cited more often than others

Piwowar, H., & Vision, T. J. (2013). Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ PrePrints, 1:e1. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.1”[…] we find a robust citation benefit from open data […] there is a direct effect of third-party data reuse that persists for years […] a substantial fraction of archived datasets are reused, and the intensity of dataset reuse has been steadily increasing since 2003."

Seven common objections to data sharing...and how to overcome them (1-4)

Why not share? How to overcome?1. No one else can understand the complexity of my data

Document the data, describing the conditions of the research

2. If someone else analyzes my data, they may come up with a different answer disproving my perspective

By considering different perspectives on the same data set, we will come closer to the “right” answer

3. Someone else may find something new in my data that I did not see

Finding something new in an existing data set will increase the return on investment in the data collection

4. I have not finished analyzing my data, and I will make it available once my analysis is complete

Research is a never-ending story… A published paper suggests that the data have been substantially analyzed; thus sharing at this point seems appropriate

Adapted from Stephen H. Koslow (2000)

Seven common objections to data sharing...and how to overcome them (5-7)

Why not share? How to overcome?5. It is my data that I worked very hard to collect, and no one else has the right to it.

Publicly funded data should be publicly available. A publication implies that research results are to be shared. Reviewers and readers should have access to the primary data on which publications are based.

6. I cannot trust or understand the data produced in another laboratory

If this is not possible, how can we trust the scientific literature? This is the mirror image of 1.

7. Documenting my data for others costs me time for which I get no credit

You will be rewarded by more citations; your work will be more visible and your data will be cited as well.

Adapted from Stephen H. Koslow (2000), ‘Should the neuroscience community make a paradigm shift to sharing primary data?’, Nature America Inc., 3:9 (September), p. 863-865.

Data Archiving and Networked Services

DANS is an institute of KNAW en NWO

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peter.doorn@dans.knaw.nltwitter: @pkdoorn

http://youtu.be/HJbo-OAaJ1I

The work DANS does summarized in a 4 minute video, introduced by Neelie Kroes