Open Data in Music and Science – Music & Science Lab | Durham University

"We have all heard about the replication crisis in psychology. It is not that the research ideas or methods themselves are flakey but selective analysis and reporting as well as insufficient details are making the past findings difficult to replicate. There have been several proposals aimed to mitigate this problem such as pre-registering studies beforehand and altering the statistical principles, but perhaps the simplest solution is to share data. To what degree does data sharing happen in music and science at the moment? Are there other incentives to do it than just produce better quality scholarship? Sharing data basically means that data – which not only includes the raw observations but all  explanations of the procedures (pre-processing, meta-data, etc.) relating to it – are freely available to anybody without any other restrictions than permissive licenses such as CC BY. Such data is typically called Open Data or Open Access data in some parlance. Open Data is now actively encouraged and even required by many funders such as Research Councils in Britain. There are ample opportunities to share data on robust repositories such as Harvard Dataverse, UK Data ReShare, Dryad, Figshare, or Open Science Frame (OSF). These repositories will provide excellent guidance on how to best share the data. But the question of motivation is perhaps the one that needs a reflection....

What about Open Data in music and science?

In my opinion this topic is bubbling under in our field. Many of the journals in our field (Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae, and Psychomusicology) do not yet explicitly mention or require Open Data. Only the new arrival, Music and Science, has an explicit endorsement of the Open Data, although I suspect this will change over the next few years when the integration of repositories and manuscript submission procedures at journals will become more common (Royal Society Open Science is a good example requiring the full data to be deposited to an approved repository before accepting the manuscript for a review)...."