Scientists must share early and share often to boost citations

" ... A paper published overnight by American researchers Heather Piwowar and Todd Vision in the open access journal PeerJ has finally reliably demonstrated what many data sharing advocates have been saying for a long time. Far from hurting the ability to publish, sharing data in a public repository can actually lead to a tangible benefit to your publication record through increased citations ... Both the US National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation now require grant applicants to at least include a data sharing plan in their applications. In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is a signatory to a joint statement that says some nice things about data sharing, but only in the field of public health.  However, these policies do not yet mandate full data sharing, because, unlike open access publishing, open access data sharing is still seen by the people who generate the thing being made open as a potential threat ... What Piwowar and Vision have shown is that papers that reported on research where the underlying data was made available in a public repository received 9% more citations than similar studies for which the data was not made available.  To arrive at this conclusion they analysed the citation counts of 10,555 papers on gene expression studies that created microarray data. These types of studies routinely generate large amounts of raw data by measuring the activity of sometimes thousands of different genes in multiple samples.  A quarter of the papers analysed in this experiment described studies that made data discoverable in one of the two most widely-used gene expression microarray repositories: the US National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Gene Expression Omnibus and the European Bioinformatics Institute’s ArrayExpress. The remaining 75% merely reported the outcomes of each study’s analysis. The underlying data was not made available for reuse in other studies or to confirm the veracity of the original claims.  By comparing the number of citations that papers with and without publicly shared data available, Piwowar and Vision demonstrated a small but significant increase in the number of times papers with data available were cited ..."