Jens Kattge asks how we can make sharing data attractive to researchers, especially as their data ages, giving the example of the TRY initiative which is a successful and well-used repository for plant traits … Read more
Henning Hermjakob has been working on establishing frameworks that make data sharing possible, and easy, by motivating the proteomics community to encourage data sharing. How do we make data easy to deposit, easy to discover, and easy to claim credit for? … Read more
Kaylene Simpson says: “You become very passionate when you’ve spent such a long time performing a screen, and it’s not just about the end target of the publication, but it’s about sharing a gold mine of data.” Read more
Mark Thorley identifies two issues: one is preservation of the data, and the second is preservation of the knowledge to use data, which tends to be lost as people move on and retire, meaning that we lose knowledge about how to reuse data effectively as a result. Read more
The second in our blogs on data preservation gives the view from the Oak Ridge National Lab, a programmatic archive for the NASA terrestrial ecology programme, which endeavours to archive data for a user 20 years in the future. Robert Cook describes the difficulty in doing this, when it’s hard to predict how a researcher might use data in five years’ time, let alone 20! … Read more
Professor Poldrack believes that preservation is one of the most fundamental and important aspects of data sharing. However, he is concerned with how we make preservation of data sustainable, given that centers like his have to curate the datasets, and believes it is researchers who are ‘really responsible’ for making sure their data are preserved. Read more
Professor Soranno discusses the issues ecologists face when gathering data, including how to make the data easily discoverable and reusable – particularly when a large amount of data is collected by government agencies, and when online repositories are rarely used. She asks, how do we achieve a cultural shift which enables academics to share their data online? Read more
The Honorary Academic Editor for Scientific Data has spent years helping others to structure, share and explore their data in the life, natural and biomedical sciences. Dr Sansone debates the importance of format when publishing data online, and how we can make data more easily reusable. … Read more
Professor Hay works on the Malaria Atlas Project, which disseminates free, accurate and up-to-date information on malaria, organised on a geographical basis. The whole ethos of the project is open access, but it utilises open data, and open code too. He shares his thoughts on why researchers benefit from making their data open, and why researchers need to take more responsibility for open science, while also explaining his theory of ‘dirty laundry syndrome.’ … Read more
“No-one is born into this world understanding how computer tomography data ought to be interpreted,” says Professor Rowe. He asks how we can establish best practice for scientists looking to store data, and what incentive we can offer young researchers looking to share data. Should data sharing be one of the social underpinnings of modern science? Read more