Research Practices in the wake of COVID-19 | Advancing Discovery | Springer Nature

"The current climate has put a spotlight onto the value and importance of data sharing and curation and  good data management for boosting the reproducibility and reliability of research.  Its value has never been pulled more sharply into focus as you can see the real life impact of data sharing as we navigate this pandemic. After five years of collaboration on an annual survey of researchers, we can see increasing positive attitudes and behaviours when it comes to data sharing, and yet many researchers and those within the research community still face roadblocks – be this because of challenges in working practices, the lack of tools or services supporting them, or the wider misconception around the role, use and appropriate re-use of data – and this is a problem. 

Since 2016 Figshare, Springer Nature and Digital Science have partnered on the State of Open Data report, based on a survey tracking researcher attitudes and behaviours towards open data sharing and research data management.  The most recent survey launched  in May this year, and with the global pandemic we took the opportunity to ask researchers how Covid-19 was impacting their ability to carry out research, and their views on reuse of data and collaboration. We wanted to get a better understanding of how researcher behaviour was being affected.  When the survey was conducted much of the world was under lockdown which has since eased, however, fears of a second wave are growing. We are aware of the time sensitivity of these insights so rather than wait until October we wanted to release a snapshot of the data  to the community as soon as we could, to allow stakeholders the time to analyse the data to help inform policy and actions going forward as we enter a new phase of the pandemic. The data published this week was from surveys dating from 24th May to 18th June, n=3,436. ..."