Fieldnote Feb 1 2023 - 11:54am

The article below, and reports it links out to, are good for us to work with.  The article is good on the value of research data sharing -- but misses many for the reasons we are so invested in (the experiment of) reseach data sharing. 

Kaiser, Jocelyn and Brainard, Jeffrey. 2023. “Ready, Set, Share! As funders roll out new requirements for making data freely available, researchers weigh costs and benefits.” Science. January 25.

Existing data can help researchers generate hypotheses, design clinical trials, and teach. And by pooling smaller data sets, scientists can conduct meta-analyses that can produce robust or intriguing findings, says Maryann Martone, a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco. She points to a study that gathered raw data from an array of animal studies conducted in the 1990s on treatments for spinal cord injury. The results from the individual studies were inconsistent and never published. But a 2021 analysis of pooled data from 1125 animals produced a significant correlation: Animals with blood pressure levels within a certain window during spine surgery fared better, a finding that held up in a clinical study. “There’s real gold in these small data sets, if you can put them together,” Martone says.

Sharing typically doesn’t count for much in tenure and promotion reviews, for example. Academic institutions should encourage departments to develop policies for providing such rewards, according to a 2021 joint report from the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

NIH’s push could test the kinds of changes that all federally funded researchers will need to make by December 2025, when a revised data-sharing policy announced in August 2022 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) takes effect. (The new policy also drew attention for requiring that journal articles be free to access when published.)

To avoid data sharing that is incomplete or poorly done, funders and institutions may need to not only threaten researchers with sticks, but also offer them carrots, in the form of technical support and training, says Dylan Ruediger, a project manager at Ithaka S+R, a higher education research and consulting organization. He managed an NSF-funded project that brought together interdisciplinary teams of researchers in fields as disparate as agronomy, nuclear imaging, and polar science to examine barriers to data sharing.

Another challenge to be solved: Even the largest repositories are still looking for sustainable business models. Discipline-specific ones are typically supported by grants for individual projects that don’t assure funding after the grant ends. NIH’s and OSTP’s policies don’t spell out for how long data must be stored and shared; Jorgenson says the agency “will be collecting lots of information” to inform a more specific policy on this.

Worth looking at in full (linked to above)

Schonfeld, Roger and Rebecca Springeroct. 2019. The Research Data Sharing Business Landscape. October 2. The Scholarly Kitchen. 

• Prompts to rethink how we are interfaciing with Zenodo. 

Ruediger, D. et al. 2022. Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science: Findings From an Incubation Workshop Series.  

• We should - again -  look for funding to do this kind of research within qualitative data communities). 

Association of American Universities and Association of Public Land Grant Universities. 2021. Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research  Data.

• Recommends crediting research data sharing in tenure and promotion evaluations.