Despite agreeing to make raw data available, some authors fail to comply. The right strategies and platforms can ease the task.
Journals and funding bodies increasingly require manuscript authors to share data on request or make the information publicly available. It’s a big ask from a technical standpoint, but some straightforward strategies can simplify the process.
There are plenty of good reasons for you to share the data from a research project. Amongst other things, they can increase the impact of your research and it can benefit your career. There are also ethical arguments for data sharing, especially when the process of collecting/generating/accessing data has risks and/or burdens associated with it. It does require you to anticipate the sharing in your application for research ethics review and in your consent material (accompanied with something like a opt-out tick box, so people can indicate that they consent in participating in your research project and separately indicate if they are happy for their data to be shared). There are also considerable efficiencies and public good in such sharing. This is why an increasing number of research funding bodies, institutions and publishers are calling for researchers to share their data. This fantastic Nature piece discusses some of the practicalities.
Such reticence costs the research community. Data transparency allows others to repeat analyses and catch mistakes or fraudulent claims. It allows for new findings through the reanalysis of existing data sets, and it increases trust in the scientific process. In August, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that, by 2025, scientific data from all new federally funded research must be made accessible to the US public. And when submitting papers, authors are increasingly required to provide raw data to editors, to place data online or to include data-sharing statements as to whether they will offer data on request. Unfortunately, such policies are not bulletproof, as the largest study of its kind starkly documents.
In May, Livia Puljak, who studies evidence-based medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, and her colleagues published a study in which they looked at the roughly 300 journals published by BioMed Central, an open-access publisher that is part of Springer Nature, which also publishes Nature. The researchers identified 1,792 manuscripts published in January 2019 that declared their data were available “on request” or “on reasonable request”1. In early 2021, they e-mailed the corresponding authors, asking for access to the raw data. To allay concerns that the study could produce embarrassing findings, they noted that the analysis would be anonymized: “We will not disclose any details about author characteristics,” they wrote.
