We need more carrots: give academic researchers the support and incentives to share data | Impact of Social Sciences

"Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, and reproduce is fundamental to open science, and ultimately makes research more efficient and effective. Yet despite funder policies that encourage and require data sharing, researchers in both the UK and the US report lower percentages of data sharing than the global average. In addition to progressive policies, Grace Baynes suggests researchers should be given incentives, expert support, training, and the infrastructure to make it seamless and easy to share data, and worth their while. Governments, funders, research institutions, libraries, and publishers all have a role to play to unlock the huge potential of research data.

To achieve real “open science” we need to open up all areas of research, including research data. Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, and reproduce will make research more efficient and effective. Members of the newly formed UK Research and Innovation, an independent organisation that brings together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England, the Wellcome Trust, and other UK funders have moved early to encourage and require data sharing. Yet researchers in the UK report lower percentages of data sharing than the global average. Policy must be coupled with greater support and education for researchers, and faster, easier routes to sharing data optimally. Incentives and credit for data sharing are also needed. As a publisher I firmly believe research articles and scholarly books and monographs are important summaries and conclusions of years of work for researchers. However, the real building blocks of discovery are the data they produce...."