The Importance of Sharing Research Data
- Research data sharing aids evaluation of research findings by a wider audience, making it easier for others to validate and replicate.
- Data organization and management in preparation for sharing improves your data completeness and usability.
- Research data sharing allows follow up researchers to next step advancement, and cumulative advancements based on multiple shared datasets.
- Making research data visible and accessible increases likelihood that research will be cited, gaining greater impact and recognition for research contributions.
- Depositing your data in a recognized repository ensures long-term preservation of data for future researchers
- Sharing research data associated with articles is becoming a requirement of many scholarly publishers.
- Research data management for data sharing is becoming a requirement of Canadian research grant funding, and funding from many other sources.
Canadian Tri-agency includes the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These funding agencies strongly support research data sharing, data management and open access. These agencies have set polices which will require grant funded researchers to organize and manage data produced for funded research, so that it can be shared with other researchers.
Many International research funders also require open data sharing including:
- The Sloan Foundation
- The Gates Foundation
- United States National Science Foundation
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- European Commission
