Empty rhetoric over data sharing slows science : Nature News & Comment

"So which fields need to raise their data-access game? Nature suggests that the geodesy and seismology communities should consider reducing their current two-year embargoes. The microbiome community places great value on open data but, as a relatively young field, is struggling to establish standards.

Thumbs up for two communities that are making progress in this realm. In pathogen genomics, the authors of the Zika virus genome papers we publish in this issue (see pages 401, 406 and 411) made the sequences openly available as soon as they were generated.

Credit should also be given to palaeontologists in their pursuit of an open strategy for 3D data. A recent paper, ‘Open data and digital morphology’ (T. G. Davies et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 284, 20170194; 2017), proposes best practice for the creation, storage, publication and dissemination of large 3D data sets, including recommended file formats and data repositories. The conclusion is that 3D data should be available at the time of article publication, accompanied by as much detail as possible on its nature and the circumstances of its collection.

Where researchers establish clear standards and repositories, Nature will be delighted to help mandate their use as a condition of publication. Where such coherence is lacking, we necessarily take a more piecemeal approach. Despite years of discussion, funders, researchers and journals have much work to do to improve the transparency and reproducibility of research by means of data accessibility."