Data-sharing: Everything on display : Naturejobs

"Lizzie Wolkovich always felt she ought to make her research data freely available online. “The idea that data should be public has been in the background through my entire career,” she says. Yet in 2003–09, while she was working on her ecology PhD, there were few incentives for her to share. Sharing would not help her to get grants or publications, and although posting data online was not unheard of, few researchers actually did it, she says. Many preferred to hang on to their hard-won field data, sharing privately if they did so at all. But after she earned her doctorate, Wolkovich overcame her hesitation, thanks to a combination of helpful colleagues, improved resources and a discernible shift in the research community's attitude. So in 2010, through an online data repository called the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, Wolkovich released her doctoral data set — the fruit of thousands of hours spent measuring the diversity of arthropods in 56 experimental soil plots she had set up in the arid scrubscape of southern California. Since then, she has publicized all the data that she has collected, including a meta-analysis of 50 other studies that she examined to see how factors such as rising temperatures affect the life cycles of plants. Wolkovich, now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, says that she herself had never objected to sharing her results — she had just not known how to do so. She likes the fact that her data are now easily accessible to other researchers and anyone else who is interested. 'It saves me so much time,' she says. Wolkovich is one of a number of early-career researchers who are enthusiastically posting their work online. They are publishing what one online-repository founder calls small data — experimental results, data sets, papers, posters and other material from individual research groups — as opposed to the 'big data' spawned by large consortia, which usually employ specialists to plan their data storage and release. The many resources now available give researchers options for where and how to post their data, releasing potentially fruitful data sets that used to be locked up in unpublished paper files, buried in journal-article appendices or hidden away on scientists' hard drives ...  'Lots of people are getting into data-hosting, and I think it will be tricky to decide where to put your data,' says Heather Piwowar, who studies data-sharing for the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina ... Even people whose data are less popular can benefit, adds Piwowar. By making the effort to organize and label files so that others can understand them, scientists become more organized and better disciplined themselves, and can avoid confusion later on. 'It is often very hard to find and understand your own work if you are looking at it years from now,' says Piwowar. Scientists might be inclined to stuff their data into folders that can get lost and muddled — but if they store the files in an online repository, they are forced to curate and collate the data, she says.  The fear of being scooped is a powerful inhibitor. But scientists can put an embargo on their data, so that only they can see the work until they are ready to make it public. And data sets are becoming increasingly citable, bringing their authors formal recognition: data published in a data journal, on Dryad or on the repository figshare.com are given a digital object identifier (DOI) that can be referenced in other publications. (Figshare is owned by Digital Science, a sister company to Nature Publishing Group.)  Depositing data on a personal website is unlikely to be the best way to get it reused and cited. For a start, the website may not be around in five years, says William Michener, director of e-science initiatives at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Michener is principal investigator for a multinational programme called DataO