Summary of drivers and barriers in data sharing

Nice summary of the drivers, barriers, and enablers that determine stakeholder engagement based on expert interviews in Dallmeier-Tiessen et al., 2014, Enabling Sharing and Reuse of Scientific Data (restricted access).

Drivers and benefits

• Societal benefits - economic/commercial benefits; continued education; inspiring the young; allowing the exploitation of the cognitive surplus in society; better quality decision making in government and commerce; citizens being able to hold governments to accountable.
• Academic benefits - the integrity of science; increased public understanding of science.
• Research benefits - validation of scientific results by other scientists; recognition of their contribution; reuse of data in meta-studies to find hidden effects/trends; testing new theories against past data; doing new science not considered when data was collected without repeating the experiment; easing discovery of data by searching/mining across large datasets with benefits of scale; easing discovery and understanding of data across disciplines to promote interdisciplinary studies; combining with other data (new or archived) in the light of new ideas.
• Organizational benefits - publication of high quality data and citation of data enhance organizational profile; preserved data linked to published articles adds value to the product; data preservation is more business; reputation of institution as “data holder with expert support” is increased; combining data from multiple sources helps to make policy decisions; reuse of data instead of new data collection reduces time and cost to new research results; use of data for teaching purposes.
• Individual contributor benefits - preserving data for the contributor to access later — sharing with your future self; peer visibility and increased respect achieved through publications and citation; increased research funding; when more established in their careers through increased control of organizational resources; the socio-economic impact of their research (e.g., spin-out companies, patent licenses, inspiring legislation); status, promotion and pay increase with career advancement; status conferring awards and honors.

Barriers and Enablers are Related to:

• Individual contributor incentives
• Availability of a sustainable preservation infrastructure
• Trustworthiness of the data, data usability, pre-archive activities
• Data discovery
• Academic defensiveness
• Finance
• Subject anonymity and personal data confidentiality
• Legislation/regulation