Digital Science Open Principles

At Digital Science, our vision is of a trusted collaborative research ecosystem that drives progress for all. In support of this, and our commitment to align more closely with the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, we are proud to introduce Digital Science’s Open Principles – an initiative which commits our research information solutions to open science now and into the future.

1. Community ownership: we believe that research outcomes are owned by the global community and should be available to all
2. Participating in open infrastructure: we commit to support the use of open standards and to build, contribute to, and extend open infrastructures
3. Stakeholders’ primacy: we believe that stakeholder benefits should be at the forefront
4. Establishing trust: we believe that a trusted stakeholder in the research ecosystem must be responsible, transparent and sustainable.

See our Open Principles to find out more about Digital Science’s commitment to opening up research for everyone.

How can I best support faculty in navigating the open research landscape?

In The State of Open Data 2023 report, nearly three-quarters of researchers said they had never received support for making their data openly available.

Maturing your research management infrastructure and support offerings is crucial to effectively support your research community with growing funder and publisher requirements for open research. 
Figshare repository infrastructure and Symplectic Elements work together to provide a holistic research management solution; reducing administrative burden, creating efficiencies for your team and offering best-in-class research management systems for your researchers and faculty.

Discover Figshare

Discover Symplectic Elements

Watch the webinar: on demand

How can I streamline our open research workflows and facilitate collaboration?

Support a more open and comprehensive research management solution. Implement a research management process to share, showcase and manage all institutional research outputs in one place.

Discover Figshare

Reduce the administrative burden of research information management, by ingesting data from a wide range of sources to build a truly comprehensive picture of institutional data.

Discover Symplectic Elements

How can I increase transparency and help raise the level of reproducibility?

Provide trusted repository infrastructure that enables research to be as open and discoverable as possible. Complete with altmetrics and citation data, researchers can get credit for all of their research outputs.

Make your researchers and their expertise as discoverable as possible by repurposing research information data to populate fully-rounded profiles including biographical information as well as publications, grants and professional & teaching activities. To help your research go even further, you can also provide profile visitors with direct links to open access copies of your publications.

Discover Symplectic Elements

Discover how The Francis Crick Institute is using the technology of Symplectic and Figshare to empower its researchers to have richer research profiles and to make it easier for them to publish their papers and data Open Access.

How can I support researchers to comply with Open Research mandates?

As policy requirements for open research from publishers and funders grow, support your researchers with the complexities of compliance. 

Implement reliable repository infrastructure that meets the growing demands for all aspects of research to become open, FAIRer, faster, freer and more connected.

Discover Figshare

How can I help build trust in research?

For those involved in research communications, the integrity and trustworthiness of research are as important as the attention and citations it receives. Dimensions’ Trust Markers can help you to assess the transparency and reproducibility of published research. Not only that, but Dimensions interconnected research data provides you peace of mind and results you can trust thanks to a 360 view of the research ecosystem.

Discover Dimensions

How can I analyze the impact of Open Access?

Open Access is an integral part of the journey to a more collaborative research environment. 

Dimensions’ rich data and analytical capabilities provides multiple filters to easily display results which are Open Access. With over 48 million Open Access (OA) records, including publications, preprints, open monographs, chapters, and books. You can understand the impact of Open Access quickly and easily.

You can use this data to assess your university’s status with OA publishing and evaluate new strategic initiatives.

Discover Dimensions

If we’re going to have a conversation with a publisher, I can jump quickly into Dimensions and see exactly what Iowa State is doing with that publisher, what journals our faculty are publishing in and so on, because they would be the key stakeholders for that particular agreement.

Curtis Brundy | Iowa State University

Hear how Iowa State University uses Dimensions to help move towards Open Access

Partnering with the community

For more than a decade we have been partnering with the research community in support of open research and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community.

2012

Figshare launch

2015

DataCite board

2017

Figshare partnership with ORCiD

2019

Digital Science becomes one of four founding partners of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI)

2022

Figshare participation in Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI)

2024

Mark Hahnel announced as Digital Science’s VP Open Research

2024

Digital Science adopts Open Principles

I want to celebrate cost-effective and equitable open access and learn how to ensure trustworthy dissemination of academic research in a post-AI world. I look forward to collaborating with everyone driving academia and humanity forward further, and faster through open research.

Mark Hahnel | VP Open Research and Founder of Figshare | Digital Science

Latest insights

Open research at Digital Science

Mark Hahnel, VP Open Research and Founder of Figshare, explains

Read now

The State of Open Data 2023

The longest running longitudinal survey and analysis on open data

Read now

Who benefits when, from FAIR data?

This three-part series discusses when different sectors and players may benefit from Open FAIR data

Read now

Digital Science commits to Open Principles

This piece navigates research data publication fragmentation, exploring how the FAIR data principles are pivotal in this context.

Read now

Automating NIH grant compliance

Discover how Duke University are automating NIH grant compliance with Symplectic Elements at Duke University.

Read now

Driving an open data culture change 

Explore the successful implementation of a Figshare-powered data repository for the University of Malta (UM).

Read now

Our latest insights delivered straight to your inbox

Sign up for our newsletter to stay updated on the latest developments in the research ecosystem, as well as insights into the latest news from Digital Science.

The post Open research for academic institutions appeared first on Digital Science.

Figshare hosts an annual “State of Open Data (SOOD)” Report where it aims to provide insight into researchers around the world regarding their attitudes towards and experiences of open data containing 6,091 usable data. For this project, we decided to take the time to dig deeper into the results of the reports to see where the trends were not consistent based on different demographics. 

In analyzing answers to questions about the researchers themselves, research data collection and curation, support for research, we began to notice the data between the top 10 countries showed a consistent divergence with some common names repeatedly popping up. As such, this report is “The Global Lens: Highlighting national nuances in researchers’ attitudes to open data”.

You can begin to see the trends and the differences in some of the data we started to uncover below. When researchers answered the question on the survey “Thinking about the country in which you are currently working, how supportive are you of the idea of a national mandate for making research data more openly  available?” – In Ethiopia, 48% of researchers strongly favour, and 77% support, a national mandate. In the U.S., 61%  support, with 18% opposed. In Japan, 14% are strongly in favour, and 42% support, but a majority (58%) are neutral or against, with 17% opposed.

When creating a visual representation of the statistics, a common pattern emerged, the contrast between Ethiopia, Japan and USA on their view on Open Data. 

Our team tries to uncover the “why” behind various countries’ perspectives on open data. We look at each country’s history of research practices, funding, and policies. Exploring these factors individually was not sufficient to gain a thorough understanding. Thus, using the Digital Science network, we consulted experts that have worked or have experience in each country to validate our findings and deepen our insights into the world of researchers and open data.

About the Author

Mark Hahnel, Vice President Open Research | Digital Science

Mark Hahnel is the VP Open Research at Digital Science. He is the founder of Figshare, which he created while completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. Mark sits on the board of DataCite and the advisory board for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). He was on the judging panel for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Wellcome Trust Open Science prize and acted as an advisor for the Springer Nature master classes.

The post Three Countries. Three Different Views on Open Data. appeared first on Digital Science.

The 2023 survey saw over 6,000 responses and the report that has now been published takes an in-depth look at the responses and purposefully takes a much more analytical approach than has been seen in previous years, unveiling unprecedented insights.

Five key takeaways from The State of Open Data 2023

Support is not making its way to those who need it

Over three-quarters of respondents had never received any support with making their data openly available. 

One size does not fit all

Variations in responses from different subject expertise and geographies highlight a need for a more nuanced approach to research data management support globally. 

Challenging stereotypes

Are later career academics really opposed to progress? The results of the 2023 survey indicate that career stage is not a significant factor in open data awareness or support levels. 

Credit is an ongoing issue

For eight years running, our survey has revealed a recurring concern among researchers: the perception that they don’t receive sufficient recognition for openly sharing their data. 

AI awareness hasn’t translated to action

For the first time, this year we asked survey respondents to indicate if they were using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for data collection, processing and metadata creation. 

Diving deeper into the data than ever before 

This year, we dive deeper into the data than ever before and look at the differing opinions of our respondents when we compare their regions, career stages, job titles and subject areas of expertise. 

Figshare founder and CEO Mark Hahnel said of this approach, “It feels like the right time to do this. Whilst a global funder push towards FAIR data has researchers globally moving in the same direction, it is important to recognize the subtleties in researchers’ behaviors based on variables in who they are and where they are.”

This year features extensive analysis of the survey results data and provides an in-depth and unique view of attitudes towards open data. 

This analysis provided some key insights; notably that researchers at all stages of their careers share similar enthusiasm for open data, are motivated by shared incentives and struggle to overcome the same obstacles. 

These results are encouraging and challenge the stereotype that more experienced academics are opposed to progress in the space and that those driving progress are primarily early career researchers. 

We were also able to look into the nuanced differences in responses from different regions and subject areas of expertise, illuminating areas for targeted outreach and support. These demographic variations also led us to issue a recommendation to the academic research community to look to understand the ‘state of open data’ in their specific setting.  

Benchmarking attitudes towards the application of AI 

In light of the intense focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and its application this year, for the first time, we decided to ask our survey respondents if they were using any AI tools for data collection, processing or metadata collection. 

The most common answer to all three questions was,“I’m aware of these tools but haven’t considered it.”

Although the results don’t yet tell a story, we’ve taken an important step in benchmarking how researchers are currently using AI in the data-sharing process. Within our report, we hear from Niki Scaplehorn and Henning Schoenenberger from Springer Nature in their piece ‘AI and open science: the start of a beautiful relationship?’ as they share some thoughts on what the future could hold for research data and open science more generally in the age of AI. 

We are looking forward to evaluating the longitudinal response trends for this survey question in years to come as the fast-moving space of AI and its applications to various aspects of the research lifecycle accelerate farther ahead. 

Recommendations for the road ahead 

In our report, we have shared some recommendations that take the findings of our more analytical investigation and use them to inform action points for various stakeholders in the community. This is an exciting step for The State of Open Data, as we more explicitly encourage real-world action from the academic community when it comes to data-sharing and open data. 

Understanding the state of open data in our specific settings: Owing to the variations in responses from different geographies and areas of expertise, we’re encouraging the academic community to investigate the ‘state of open data’ in their specific research setting, to inform tailored and targeted support. 

Credit where credit’s due: For eight years running, our respondents have repeatedly reported that they don’t feel researchers get sufficient credit for sharing their data. Our recommendation asks stakeholders to consider innovative approaches that encourage data re-use and ultimately greater recognition. 

Help and guidance for the greater good: The same technical challenges and concerns that pose a barrier to data sharing transcend different software and disciplines. Our recommendation suggests that support should move beyond specific platform help and instead tackle the bigger questions of open data and open science practices. 

Making outreach inclusive: Through our investigation of the 2023 survey results, we saw that the stage of an academic’s career was not a significant factor in determining attitudes towards open data and we saw consensus between early career researchers and more established academics. Those looking to engage research communities should be inclusive and deliberate with their outreach, engaging those who have not yet published their first paper as well as those who first published over 30 years ago. 

What’s next for The State of Open Data?  

The State of Open Data 2023 report is a deliberate change from our usual format; usually, our report has contributed pieces authored by open data stakeholders around the globe. This year, we’ve changed our approach and we are beginning with the publication of this first report, which looks at the survey data through a closer lens than before. We’ve compared different subsets of the data in a way we haven’t before, in an effort to provide more insights and actionable data for the community.

In early 2024, we’ll be releasing a follow-up report, with a selection of contributed pieces from global stakeholders, reflecting on the survey results in their context. Using the results showcased in this first report as a basis, it’s our hope that this follow-up report will apply different contexts to these initial findings and bring new insights and ideas. 

In the meantime, we’re hosting two webinars to celebrate the launch of our first report and share the key takeaways. In our first session, The State of Open Data 2023: The Headlines, we’ll be sharing a TL;DR summary of the full report; our second session, The State of Open Data 2023: In Conversation, will convene a panel of global experts to discuss the survey results. 

You can sign up for both sessions here: 

The State of Open Data 2023: The Headlines

The State of Open Data 2023: In Conversation

About the Author

Laura Day, Marketing Director | Figshare

Laura is the Marketing Director at Figshare, part of Digital Science. Before joining Digital Science, Laura worked in scholarly publishing, focusing on open access journal marketing and transformative agreements. In her current role, Laura focuses on marketing campaigns and outreach for Figshare. She is passionate about open science and is excited by the potential it has to advance knowledge sharing by enabling academic research communities to reach new and diverse audiences.

The post The State of Open Data 2023: A more analytical approach provides unparalleled insights appeared first on Digital Science.

This new supplementary report offers real-life perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of sharing research data openly, giving us unique viewpoints as told by members of our research community – industry, funders, academic institutions, and publishers.

For the first time in the history of The State of Open Data comes a supplementary report that expands upon the results of our years of surveys. From theory to practice offers real-life perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of sharing research data openly, giving us unique viewpoints as told by members of our research community – industry, funders, academic institutions, and publishers.

By sharing their case studies, the authors of this report enhance the experience of The State of Open Data 2023’s key findings and recommendations. Here we see how some of those recommendations are being put into practice, and the effort being made to ensure open research has a robust, meaningful, sustainable, and impactful future.

The State of Open Data 2023 deliberately took a more analytical approach to the survey data than in previous years. From theory to practice provides essential context that any member of the research community might recognize, and wish to learn from and emulate.

Read the report

The Global Lens

In an effort to emphasise the depth of the data that is made openly available by The State of Open Data survey, we are delighted to release a re-analysis by undergraduates at Kings College London: The Global Lens: Highlighting national nuances in researchers attitudes to open data.

As the title alludes to, this report takes a deep dive into the differences in responses from researchers based in different countries. The report focuses on Ethiopia, Japan and the United States to demonstrate that global trends don’t always align with national trends.

Read the report

The State of Open Data 2023 deliberately takes a more analytical approach to the survey data than in previous years. With more data surfaced, the 2023 report provides unique and unparalleled insights into researchers’ attitudes towards and interactions with open data and data sharing. 

The report digs into the survey responses and looks at differing trends when comparing respondents’ geographies and other demographic factors. Using these insights, we take a look towards the future and offer some recommendations to the academic community.

Read the report

Support is not making its way to those who need it

Over three-quarters of respondents had never received support with making their data openly available. 

One size does not fit all

Variations in responses from different subject expertise and geographies highlight a need for a more nuanced approach to research data management support globally. 

Challenging stereotypes

Are later career academics really opposed to progress? The results of the 2023 survey indicate that career stage is not a significant factor in open data awareness or support levels. 

Credit is an ongoing issue 

For eight years running, our survey has revealed a recurring concern among researchers: the perception that they don’t receive sufficient recognition for openly sharing their data.

AI awareness hasn’t translated to action

For the first time, this year we asked survey respondents to indicate if they were using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for data collection, processing and metadata collection.

To celebrate tha launch of The State of Open Data 2023 and to share the key findings of this year’s survey, we hosted a webinar series.

Find out more about the sessions and watch on demand.

Catch up now

The post State of Open Data appeared first on Digital Science.

Date and Time: Tuesday November 28th 2023 09:00 ET/14:00 GMT

Join us for this online panel discussion on the State of Open Data 2023.

In this follow up session we’ll be convening a panel of global experts to discuss the results of the 2023 survey in their different contexts.

Importantly, we’ll focus on what can be learned from the survey results, what change is needed and who can drive it forward.

We’ll take a look to the future and consider what the landscape of research data sharing could look like in years to come and share our thoughts and recommendations.

Dan Penny

Dan Penny

Dan is Director of Market Intelligence at Springer Nature, and has been carrying out quantitative and qualitative work across the research market for 15 years. Prior to joining Nature he worked in consultancy with Outsell. He started his career at the turn of the millennium at Taylor & Francis, trying to persuade the world that “ebooks” might one day become a thing.

Dominique Roche

Dominique Roche

Dom Roche is a senior policy advisor at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), where he leads SSHRC’s policy work on research data management and sharing. Dr. Roche completed his PhD in aquatic ecology at the Australian National University and pursued several postdocs in Switzerland and Canada thereafter. In 2021, he co-founded the Society for Open, Reliable and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology (SORTEE.org) and was the society’s president in 2022. Dr. Roche has a longstanding interest in metascience (‘research on research’) and open science. In 2020, he received a three-year Marie Slodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission to study data sharing practices in environmental science. In his role at SSHRC, he chairs the Tri-Agency working group responsible for implementing the Tri-Agency Research Data Management (RDM) Policy; he leads the implementation of the Policy’s Data Deposit Requirement for SSHRC, NSERC and CIHR; and he is the secretary of the Tri-Agency Open Science Executive Committee. He also serves as an adviser on the Swiss Academy of Arts and Science’s Researcher Sounding Board on Open Data.

Kristi Holmes

Kristi Holmes

Kristi Holmes is Associate Dean of Knowledge Management and Strategy, director of Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center, and professor of Preventive Medicine in the division of Health and Biomedical Informatics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Holmes serves as the Chief of Knowledge Management in Northwestern’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and also serves on the leadership team of the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS), where she directs evaluation and continuous improvement for the institute and several other programs and centers, including the NNLM National Evaluation Center. Her work focuses on the discovery and equitable access to knowledge through collaborative computational and social initiatives, including the role of repositories to enable FAIR data practices and a vibrant sharing ecosystem. She brings extensive experience with highly cooperative technical information projects on the local, national, and international level.

Mark Hahnel

Mark Hahnel

Mark Hahnel is the CEO and founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. For the last eight years, Mark has been leading the development of research data infrastructure, with the core aim of reusable and interoperable academic data. Mark sits on the board of DataCite and the advisory board for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). He was on the judging panel for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Wellcome Trust Open Science prize and acted as an advisor for the Springer Nature master classes.

Yuanchun Zhou

Yuanchun Zhou

Yuanchun Zhou, Ph.D., Professor, engages on scientific big data and knowledge graph. He is currently the deputy director of the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC, CAS), the director of the Science and Technology Committee of CNIC, CAS, the director of the General Center for Scientific Data of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the chairman of the Scientific Data Committee of the China Information Association.

Watch on demand now

The post State of Open Data 2023: Session 2 appeared first on Digital Science.

Date and Time: Thursday November 16th 2023 09:00 ET/14:00 GMT

Join us for a thirty-minute webinar to hear the key results from the 2023 State of Open Data survey. 

Now in its eighth year, The State of Open Data is the longest running longitudinal survey on researchers’ attitudes towards open data and open science practices.

We will be talking through the 2023 survey results and whitepaper, sharing the key headlines and interesting differences in results across varying regions and demographics. 

This session will give a high level, TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) summary of the key results of the 2023 survey, which had over 6000 respondents. 

This is the first of a two-part series of State of Open Data Webinars from Figshare, Digital Science and Springer Nature, the second of which will be a panel debate; The State of Open Data 2023: In Conversation. 

Dan Penny

Dan Penny

Dan is Director of Market Intelligence at Springer Nature, and has been carrying out quantitative and qualitative work across the research market for 15 years. Prior to joining Nature he worked in consultancy with Outsell. He started his career at the turn of the millennium at Taylor & Francis, trying to persuade the world that “ebooks” might one day become a thing.

Mark Hahnel

Mark Hahnel

Mark Hahnel is the CEO and founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. For the last eight years, Mark has been leading the development of research data infrastructure, with the core aim of reusable and interoperable academic data. Mark sits on the board of DataCite and the advisory board for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). He was on the judging panel for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Wellcome Trust Open Science prize and acted as an advisor for the Springer Nature master classes.

Watch on demand now

The post State of Open Data 2023: Session 1 appeared first on Digital Science.

The post State of Open Data 2023 appeared first on Digital Science.

Related articles

Figshare

Read More

Advancing Openness and Responsibility

Read More

Global Attitudes Towards Open Data

Read More

The post The State of Open Data 2022 appeared first on Digital Science.

Researchers are left to navigate a system that makes it harder than not to share and where, most alarmingly, the public may only fully understand the importance of data sharing when it’s shown to have gone dramatically wrong. There’s no time to lose.

Ginny Barbour | Open Access Australasia

The answers lie in the harmony needed between policies, infrastructure and practices.

Natasha Simons | Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

What you’ll find inside:

Related articles

Figshare

Read More

Advancing Openness and Responsibility

Read More

Global Attitudes Towards Open Data

Read More

The post The State of Open Data 2021 appeared first on Digital Science.

“Researchers largely want to share their data, but the current system fails to support or adequately reward them for doing so and we are still a long way from a world where it is the norm to share fully-curated data”, argues Ginny Barbour of Open Access Australasia in her essay, How open data can help validate research and combat scientific misinformation, part of the 2021 State of Open Data report from Figshare, Digital Science, and Springer Nature.

Her article closes this year’s report, an annual endeavor we undertake with colleagues at Springer Nature, and provides something for publishers, universities, funders, government agencies, and other players to think about. She concludes: “researchers are left to navigate a system that makes it harder than not to share and where, most alarmingly, the public may only fully understand the importance of data sharing when it’s shown to have gone dramatically wrong. There’s no time to lose.” 

Since 2016, we have monitored levels of data sharing and usage, and in this, our sixth survey, we asked about motivations as well as perceived discoverability and credibility of data that is shared openly.  As 65% of respondents have never received credit or acknowledgement for sharing data, Barbour is correct that the incentives are not there to encourage sharing, and in order to improve this, the system needs to change. 

Over 4,200 researchers from around the world completed the survey, reporting increasing concern about misuse of data as well as a lack of credit and acknowledgement for those who do openly share their data. 

Of particular interest to universities may be the findings that 76% of survey respondents believe they currently get too little credit for sharing data while 30% said they would rely upon their institutional library for help making their research data openly available.

For publishers: 47% of survey respondents said they would be motivated to share their data if there was a journal or publisher requirement to do so. 53% of survey respondents obtained research data collected by other research groups from within a published research article 

Meanwhile, funders may take note of the 52% of survey respondents who said funders should make the sharing of research data part of their requirements for awarding grants. Additionally, 48% of survey respondents said that funding should be withheld (or a penalty incurred) if researchers do not share their data when the funder has mandated that they do so at the grant application stage.

Government agencies may be interested to learn that 73% of survey respondents strongly or somewhat support the idea of a national mandate for making research data openly available. 33% would like more guidance on how to comply with government policies on making research data openly available.

Other key findings are that: 

• 53% of survey respondents said it was extremely important that data are available from a publicly available repository
• 55% of survey respondents felt they needed support in regard to copyright and licenses when making research data openly available
• About a third of respondents indicated that they have reused their own or someone else’s openly accessible data more during the pandemic than before

Our respondents will likely be researchers who are interested in the topic so we thought we would see support for mandates but we were surprised that more than half of people responding to the survey felt they needed support around copyright and licenses when making data available. 

Of great concern is the lack of credit and acknowledgement for sharing data. The traditional system rewards publishing of novel findings in journals, rather than the sharing of confirmatory or negative results or underlying data and other materials related to the research. This needs to change. The pandemic has shown that sharing of data openly increases progress and benefits society. This need not be limited to public health emergencies; there are many areas of research that bring direct benefits to society, not least that which addresses the current climate emergency. Opening up research is not the whole answer but it brings with it trust in science and this will be crucial as we move through the next decade and beyond. 

Respondents’ motivations for data sharing are tied to traditional measurements of impact and credit, with 19% of respondents motivated by citation of their research papers, 14% by co-authorship on papers, 11% by increased impact and visibility of research, and 11% on public benefit. There are calls for credit systems to be put in place such as the Credit for Data Sharing initiative, though nothing is widely implemented at present.

We first started asking about the FAIR principles — ensuring data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable — in 2018 and this is the fifth anniversary of the FAIR principles. Awareness and compliance is higher than in previous years and 28% of respondents say that they are familiar with the principles, and more than half (54%) thought their data was very much or somewhat compliant with FAIR data principles. These findings indicate that concern over sharing data could lessen in the long run if data are as accessible and reusable as possible.

Elsewhere in the report are essays on data curation for enhancing data and metadata quality and tips for engaging researchers in open data sharing practices. Keisuke Iida of the Japan Science and Technology Agency shares his perspective on data sharing in Japan and Daniel Kipnis considers whether the COVID-19 pandemic has been a turning point for data sharing in the life sciences. 

report: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17061347
data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17081231
Blog cross-posted on figshare.com

The post Concerns over misuse and lack of credit for open sharing appeared first on Digital Science.