Research data is/are getting a lot of airtime at the moment. 2020 is the STM Association’s ‘Research Data Year’. The upcoming Peer Review Week focuses on ‘Trust’, which for articles must often involve open data. There’s also been a flurry of action (or calls for action) from stakeholders, including CODATA’s Beijing Declaration on Research Data and global research institutions’ Sorbonne Declaration.
National, and even publisher, guidance urge us to share our data, but rarely give us guidance on the practicalities. This Scholarly Kitchen piece discusses data sharing in the context of trust in peer review. We have included links to 16 other useful items.
The FAIR principles are the community consensus answer to the ‘How’ question of data sharing, in that they describe best practice for how to share a particular dataset. Community consensus about anything is very welcome, but by themselves, the FAIR principles don’t have the leverage to bring more data into the public sphere and thereby achieve the manifold benefits of an open research data ecosystem.