PLOS Medicine: Can Data Sharing Become the Path of Least Resistance?

"Citation: The PLOS Medicine Editors (2016) Can Data Sharing Become the Path of Least Resistance? PLoS Med 13(1): e1001949. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001949 Published: January 26, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 The PLOS Medicine Editors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors are each paid a salary by the Public Library of Science, and they wrote this editorial during their salaried time. Competing interests: The author's individual competing interests are at http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/s/competing-interests-of-the-plos-medicine-editors. PLOS is funded partly through manuscript publication charges, but the PLOS Medicine Editors are paid a fixed salary (their salaries are not linked to the number of papers published in the journal). Abbreviations: GSK, GlaxoSmithKline; ICMJE, The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors; IPD, individual participant data Provenance: Written by editorial staff; not externally peer reviewed. The PLOS Medicine Editors are Clare Garvey, Thomas McBride, Linda Nevin, Sudharshan Parthasarathy, Larry Peiperl, Amy Ross, and Paul Simpson. The year 2016 could be the year when medical research converges on data sharing as a universal standard, if recent events, reflected in several PLOS Medicine articles this month, are a good indication. Attaining that standard, however, may take a little longer. Even in morally straightforward cases, data sharing can encounter roadblocks, as discussed in a recent Policy Forum by Vasee Moorthy and colleagues at the World Health Organization [1]. WHO convened a consultation in September, inviting scientists, medical journal editors, representatives of industry, funding organizations, and government “[i]n recognition of the need to streamline mechanisms of data dissemination—globally and in as close to real-time as possible” in the context of public health emergencies. Specifically, the consultation sought to prevent the kind of delays in data sharing that may have impeded resolution of the 2014–2015 Ebola crisis. Editors attending the consultation—representing BMJ, Nature journals, New England Journal of Medicine, and the PLOS journals—were called on to address a concern that data sharing in an emergency could lead to subsequent rejection of research by journals, on the grounds of prior publication."