Open data – more obstacles or opportunities? - BioMed Central blog

"Last Thursday, Digital Science organized their first Spotlight event, held at their offices in central London. The topic: 'Open data for researchers - the obstacles and the opportunities' attracted a varied crowd of scientists, journal editors and tech gurus who gathered to discuss what open data means practically for researchers and publishers ... The discussion was led by a panel including open data advocate Ross Mounce who acted as moderator, Alan Hyndman from figshare, Michael Markie from F1000 Research,Andrew Hufton from Scientific Data, Tom Pollard a PhD student at University College London and our own Amye Kenall. The event was accompanied by lots of Twitter activity with a dedicated hashtag #OpenDataSpotlight, nicely summarized by Laura Wheeler in a Storify ... Research has shown that those who share data tend to get more citations for their articles. Alan Hyndman presented some inspiring examples of unforeseeable benefits of sharing data that included creating a map of Mythical Creatures of Europe and 3D printing of dinosaur bones ... While publishing the results of research open access has now been widely accepted, there are still many challenges to making data truly open. A very good question raised was: do we value data as a research product? It seems that for many data becomes valuable only when associated with a published paper.  Instead of mandating open data and hoping that scientists will comply, we need to focus on the benefits of sharing data, and make sure that the right incentives are in place ... Andrew Hufton pointed out that there is a role for publishers to show that data is a valuable resource. There are an increasing number of data journals, includingGigaScience, Scientific Data, F1000Research and others. Authors are in a good position to make an informed choice of the best home for their data and research based on their publishing needs ..."