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Sharing Your Research Data

Funders and publishers are strongly encouraging researchers to share not just the results data from their research in publications, but also the data files captured and created as part of their research alongside any code files that were used to produce the data. Data is commonly shared as Supplementary Information, often in a PDF or Word file, but this is not a good format to share the data for a number of reasons. These file formats are not easily read by machines, limiting their reuse and discoverability, and the lack of a standard format prevents others from being able to easily validate or reuse the data.

In this topic we will discuss why you should share your research data files, and in the next topic, What are FAIR data, we will discuss best practices for sharing data that make it easy to discover and use for other researchers.

Why should you share your research data?​

Sharing your research data has a number of benefits both for researchers themselves and for the scientific community as a whole.

For researchers sharing their data provides the opportunity for others to reproduce experiments and validate findings, encouraging transparency and enabling mistakes or problems with findings or processes to be identified sooner. There are also opportunities for users to gain greater impact and recognition by sharing data, with citations for data and code resources shared, as well as the citations for the associated publications.

For the scientific community as a whole, sharing data fosters collaboration and more rapid advancement of scientific knowledge as others can build upon the shared data and make use of the data in new and unanticipated ways. Research can also become more efficient and more cost efficient as duplication of effort can be avoided and research can make use of existing data resources. Shared data in a machine-readable format also enables technology in the form of machine-learning and artificial intelligence to be used to identify patterns in the data to make predictions about the best experiments to try and to improve processes to further increase efficiency of research and reduce the time to making important scientific discoveries.

Shared data also has an important role in improving education and employability for the next generation of researchers, providing real-world datasets for students to learn from.

What if I can't share my research data publicly?​

You may have data that can't be shared publicly for some reason. For example, it may contain sensitive information or it may be subject to an embargo due to intellectual property rights. Even though you may not be able to share the data itself publicly, it is still possible to share a description of that data. This enables others to discover that the data exists, information about how it was created, who created it and for what purpose, and how access might be gained under particular conditions. Sharing the metadata about the data maximises the data's potential for future discovery and use, and promotes a culture of transparency, efficiency and collaboration in research.

What to do next​

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