Data sharing can save important scientific work from extinction, but only if researchers take care to ensure that resources are easy to find and reuse.

Between 1969 and 1972, the United States landed six crewed spacecraft on the Moon as part of the Apollo programme. The missions retrieved priceless samples. But for more than four decades, the data from those samples remained stashed away at a handful of US laboratories — until Kerstin Lehnert came along.

A geoinformatician specializing in data rescue and preservation, Lehnert set out in 2014 to transform these data sets into a usable resource. Her team at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, pored through old conference abstracts, scanned reams of publications and debriefed the senior researchers who first studied those lunar samples to collect, organize and annotate as much information as possible. One scientist, Lehnert says, “came with a half-metre-high pile of old, folded printouts and we spent a whole summer typing those data into Excel spreadsheets”. Thanks to their efforts, these one-of-a-kind data are now freely available in the Astromaterials Data System.

Countless other laboratories, and their precious, irreplaceable data, are not so fortunate.

Lost to the ages
‘Big science’ efforts led by international consortia typically have data-management and sharing plans built in. But many labs doing small- to medium-scale studies in more specialized areas — such as analysing the biological contents of a single lake, or tracking the physiology of specific animal models — have no such systems. Their data often remain siloed in the labs that generated them, fading from memory as project members leave.

For the scientific community, that’s a tragedy of wasted effort, lost collaborative opportunities and irreproducibility. “Things don’t have to be really popular in order to be still very valuable,” says Erik Schultes, international science coordinator for the GO FAIR International Support and Coordination Office in Leiden, the Netherlands. Established in 2018 to develop best practices for data preservation and sharing, GO FAIR is one of several efforts engaging with researchers in almost every scientific discipline to secure today’s data for posterity. But success will require a concerted effort — and a shift in lab culture.