Chapter 2 Data Sharing is Important

Sharing data is critical for optimizing the advancement of scientific understanding. Now that labs all over the world are producing massive amounts of data, there are many discoveries that can be made by just using this existing data.

This is so important, that starting in January, 2023 the NIH will require specific sharing practices for data management and sharing. See the announcement here.

See this course for more information about how to comply with this policy.

Note that many institutes and funding agencies or mechanisms have requirements about how your data can be shared. Typically data sharing of protected data also requires Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval before the study is conducted. Ensure that you are following those requirements before you share your data.

There’s so many excellent reasons to put your data in a repository whether or not a journal requires it:

Sharing your data…

  1. Makes your project more transparent and thus more likely to be trusted and cited. In fact one study found that articles with links to the data used (in a repository) were cited more than articles without such information or other forms of data sharing (colavizza_citation_2020?).

Another researcher is downloading the data from a repository and says ‘These insights are so exciting! I can’t wait to look into this data even more!’

  1. Helps your relieve your own workload so your email inbox isn’t loaded by requests you probably don’t have time to respond to.

Ruby is reading a journal article with data and code she is interested in. The journal article says ‘Code and data are available upon request by email’. Ruby sends an email that says ‘ The email is going to an inbox with 999,999,565473 emails in it and it is labeled ‘the corresponding author’s inbox’.

  1. Allows others to gain even more insights from your data which shows funders that your data will be used to its maximum potential.

Ruby has uploaded her data to a repository and now its being used by many other researchers. Ruby says to her funders, represented as a bank, ‘The data you funded is getting so much mileage!’

Disclaimer: The thoughts and ideas presented in this course are not official NIH guidance and are not a substituted for legal or ethical advice and are only meant to give you a starting point for gathering information data management.

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