The State of Open Data Report by @figshare

Digital Science Report
The State of Open Data
A selection of analyses and articles about open data, curated by Figshare
Foreword by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt
OCTOBER 2016

Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable,
shareable and discoverable manner. Figshare's aim is to become the place where all academics make
their research openly available. It provides a secure cloud based storage space for research outputs
and encourages its users to manage their research in a more organized manner, so that it can be
easily made open to comply with funder mandates. Openly available research outputs will mean that
academia can truly reproduce and build on top of the research of others.
Visit www.figshare.com
Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of research. At the centre of our
mission is the support of researchers within research institutions, funding bodies, publishers and
governments, for whom we provide a range of software, content and consultancy solutions. We
believe passionately that tomorrow’s research will be different and better than today’s.
Visit www.digital-science.com
Figshare and Digital Science are grateful to Springer Nature,in particular Dan Penny andAnna
Gallagher for their expertise in assisting with the compilation of the survey and distributing it globally.
Figshare and Digital Science are also grateful to all the contributors for their thought leadership
pieces included in this report.
This report has been published by Digital Science, which is operated by global media company, the
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Digital Science,The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK. info@digital-science.com
Figshare, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, UK, info@figshare.com
Copyright © Digital Science and Figshare
About Figshare
About Digital Science
Acknowledgements
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4036398
ISBN: 978-0-9956245-1-1

1Digital Science Report
Contents
1. Foreword 2
Sir Nigel Shadbolt,University of Oxford,UK
2. Open by Default 3
Dr Mark Hahnel,Figshare,UK Dr Daniel Hook,Digital Science,UK
3. Why Open Data Now? Big Data, Knowledge Production
and the Political Economy of Research 7
Dr Sabina Leonelli,University of Exeter,UK
4. Open Season for Open Data: A Survey of Researchers 12
Dr Briony Fane,Digital Science,JonTreadway,Digital Science, Anna Gallagher,Springer Nature,
Dan Penny,Springer Nature, Dr Mark Hahnel,Figshare,UK
5. Open Data Will Save Lives – Notes from the AllTrials Campaign for
Clinical Trials Transparency 20
DrTill Bruckner Beth Ellis,Sense about Science,UK
6. Practical Steps for Increasing the Openness and Reproducibility of Research Data 23
Natalie Meyers,Center for Open Science,USA
7. Emerging Policies for Open Research Data in the United States 27
Heather Joseph,Scholarly Publishing andAcademic Resources Coalition,USA
8. Building Trust - The State of Open Data in Burkina Faso 31
Malick Tapsoba, Burkina Open Data Initiative, Burkina Faso
9. The State of Australian Research Data – Systems are Ready but Where are the Incentives? 34
David Groenewegen, Monash University, Australia
10. Can Japan Catch Up? Fostering Culture, People, and Community for Research Data 36
Nobuko Miyairi, ORCID, Japan Dr Kazuhiro Hayashi, National Institute of Science andTechnology Policy, Japan
11. The Bird in Hand: Humanities Research in the Age of Open Data 38
Prof Daniel O’Donnell University of Lethbridge, Canada
12. Appendix 40
13. Biographies 47

2 Digital Science Report
Foreword
I am delighted to introduce The State of Open Data report. As a long
time advocate for open data I have always regarded the participation of the
research sector as fundamentally important.The real prize for society is
not simply producing open data but facilitating open innovation. Open data
enables a situation where the collective genius of thousands of researchers
produces insights and analyses, inventions and understanding beyond what
isolated individuals with their silos of data could produce.We need look no
further than the success of the human genome, released as open data for all,
to understand how innovation can flourish around open research output.
Open innovation needs open data, open standards, open licences and open
participation to really flourish.
We all have our favourite examples of the power of open data and this report
provides more from which to choose. However,it is important to understand
how the research community views the opportunities and challenges of open
data.This report highlights the extent of awareness around open data,the
incentives around its use and the perspectives that researchers have about
making their own research data open. We must appreciate that researchers do
need time to reflect on their results,to determine if they are at all reliable and
to be able to extract the value in the data they have laboured hard to produce.
We must also have consistent policies that determine how data is to be made
openly available if it is funded by the public purse and if there are no significant
issues that ought to preclude its release.
If we are to really change custom,practice and culture in the research sector we
do have to recognize that we need incentives as well as mandates.Increasingly,
data is deposited along with the textual narrative of the research.Increasingly,
that data is referenced,acknowledged and cited.Increasingly,data is the principal
resource that drives aspects of the research agenda.The very availability of some
data makes certain investigations possible at all.
The call for governments and business,public and private organizations to open
up data has been a refrain for some years.League tables of the comparative
performance of countries are now available.However,we should not assume
that doing well in these exercises means that the arguments have been won.
It is essential that we highlight the benefits of open data policy.It is important
that we understand the best way to promote and incentivise the production
and consumption of open data.It is crucial that consistent policy is developed
between research funders and where possible jurisdictions.It is vital that best
practice is shared and that the data on open data made widely available.I
therefore welcome this report and commend it to you.
Sir Nigel Shadbolt FREng
Chairman and Co-Founder Open Data Institute
Principal of Jesus College Professor of Computer Science
University of Oxford
If we are to really
change custom,
practice and culture
in the research
sector we do have
to recognize that we
need incentives as
well as mandates.
We need look no
further than the
success of the human
genome, released
as open data for
all, to understand
how innovation can
flourish around open
research output.

Open by Default?
Dr Mark Hahnel, CEO, Figshare, London
Dr Daniel Hook, Managing Director, Digital Science, London
Recently, at a Digital Science Spotlight event in Denver, the subject of
discussion that evening was open data. One of the panelists spoke in an
impassioned way about the practical issues that face every researcher in
making their data open. It was not the usual talk of ethical concerns, confusion
over licensing or whether their contractual arrangements either demanded or
indeed forbade the release of their data, but rather the career implications of
their choice to make their hard-won data openly available.
On the one hand, modern research is a highly collaborative endeavor, in which
many minds work to solve complex problems requiring diverse skills and
expertise. In such an environment, it is almost impossible to believe that you
are the only person or the only group of researchers capable of addressing
your problem; or that you are the best people to address the problem in all
of the facets that are required to develop the problem further. Logically, you
should share because that’s the best way to develop a solution.
On the other hand, there is an uncomfortable reality – if everyone shares their
data but you don’t share your data, you have an advantage. You are more likely
to be successful in the next funding round due to that advantage – after all, you
will be standing on the shoulders of more giants!
The rise of the open data movement represents just one developing aspect
of the modern research environment, but, it is the component that highlights
some of the greatest sociological problems that we need to deal with in the
sector. We are not the first, nor will we be the last to point out that our
academic system is fundamentally broken – publication in particular journals
assures funding and job prospects; no-one becomes a professor for sharing
their data.
Nevertheless, opening up research and research data promises a plethora of
benefits, not only to the funders of research, but also to society at large.As
these benefits become more tangible and funders face increasing pressure
to demonstrate return on public money invested, it's clear that the academic
landscape is being driven to change to support openness. However, not all
areas of the academic landscape are evolving equally rapidly.
Academics will soon have to share all the digital outputs of their publicly-
funded research: their lab data, computer code, survey data – everything that’s
ethically appropriate. How are these changes going to affect research going
forward? Do researchers have concerns?
At Figshare, we speak to academics on a daily basis and we believe that we
have a good sense of the concerns of our users. Of course, different users
in different subjects and different geographies have different concerns. But
broadly, we can classify concerns into the following two major categories:
Opening up research
and research data
promises a plethora
of benefits.

1. Structural – Do I have to make my data open? Am I allowed to? How
do I do it?What does my data need to look like for me to share it? Doesn’t this
mean even more work for me without recognition?What happens if I make the
wrong data available – am I going to get sued?
2. Cultural – If I make my data open,couldn’t someone progress the research
at a faster rate?Would that mean that I’m helping others to progress their careers
and win grant funding at my expense? If I make my data open,couldn’t someone
question my analysis or conclusions or more easily detect errors?
Of course, as humans some of these fears are understandable. But, as humanity,
some of these fears raise serious concerns. We don’t have the space to discuss
these issues in detail in a short article like this one, but it is important to
recognize the situation.
Here we focus on the practical and ask: What can be done in the short-term
to change the status quo?
Changing the infrastructure
In our survey, more than half the respondents and 62% of early career
researchers said that they would welcome more guidance on compliance with
their funder’s policy. Given the complexity of the landscape with the interplay
of institutional, contractual and funder policies uncertainty is understandable,
but more and more help is at hand.
The role of the librarian is now much more multifaceted than it has been in
the past. Over the last decade the role has transitioned from the traditional
role of classifying, locating and accessing content, to a role that some refer
to as the 'information professional' - assisting research staff to better manage
and to better disseminate their content and, in doing so, to fulfill funder
expectations. Librarians have become an indispensable source of knowledge
around all things to do with data, code and policy; cementing their role at the
heart of the research institution as key facilitators of the research process.
Beyond the compliance landscape there are technical problems that also
need to be addressed. However, before there is a simple recipe to provide to
researchers with what to share and how to share it, we need to revisit what
it means to write a paper in modern research. The 'standard' for a paper has
moved on considerably in the last 20 years – gone are the days when papers
are static, printed artifacts: journals require supporting data and computer
code (sometimes even logical copies of whole computers) in order to ensure
reproducibility; they increasingly allow video and sound content that they
render in an online experience that constitutes an evolution to the scholarly

record unlike anything that we’ve seen in the last 350 years.Journals themselves
are fighting for relevance as a way to organize research output. One of the next
walls that is likely to fall is the idea that a paper has a definite publication date
and only a single 'version of record' exists rather than a constantly developing
narrative as data and analysis are added to a corpus of work with many
contributors.In this world data,although significantly different from different
areas,needs to achieve a level of homogeneity that experts can come back to it
in the future and continue to find meaning in it.
So how can we ensure the appropriate,useful and legal release of files? Ideally,we
would have an army of data curators ready to go,but no such army exists,and
such an option doesn’t scale very well when we haven’t yet established accepted
community standards on what constitutes good quality peer review of data.
Over the last five years the team at Figshare has been thinking about how to
meet the challenges that this new environment brings.Topics that keep coming
up in conversation are:metadata,curation and peer review.
There is no simple solution to gather quality metadata around research outputs,
or to provide context in terms of quality.However,we believe that this needs to
be a multi-step process.
Some of the key points of interaction with the user are:
• At point of file save
User generated metadata
Automated acquisition of provenance data – filetype,machine parameters
• At point of public release
• Additional specialist curation post‘publication’
• Automated curation through linked open data
Each of these opportunities adds different metadata that can serve different
purposes. If well-structured and with appropriate context included,these
additions can be tremendously valuable in downstream activities such as
discovery or computer-aided inference. Figshare is actively building or enhancing
functionality at each of these steps in the research publication process,from the
creation of custom metadata schemas in our institutional edition,to collaborations
such as Link it up1
and novel user-developed functionality based on the FigshareAPI.
The limiting factors in the progression of the use of open data are principally in
the quality of the description and metadata surrounding the data.Once these
challenges have been addressed it is key to ensure that data can 'move' Open
data can only be as powerful as the flexibility of theAPIs in the software that
helps digital files persist. As pointed out in the recent Digital Science white
paper entitled,'A New‘Research Data Mechanics’'2
,in the short term,allowing
files,metadata and identifiers to flow between institutional systems is an
achievable goal and one that has already been identified by several universities.In
the longer term,we aim to harness the power ofAPIs to query datasets in the
browser,allowing researchers to build on work gone before without needing to
download and parse open and accessible data.
Librarians have
become an
indispensable source
of knowledge around
all things to do with
data, code and policy;
cementing their role
at the heart of the
research institution
as key facilitators of
the research process.

The Data FAIRport3
initiative has set up 'Guiding Principles' for FAIR data
publishing,focusing on principles for Findability, Accessibility,Interoperability and
Reusability.The final aim is to create minimal models for grouping results and
linking data with analytics which are both human and computer actionable.By
adhering to these principles,we aim to make the content on Figshare available to
any computer or human searching for academic data through any system.
Changing the culture
As data and metadata become structured using the infrastructure described
above and the context provided by linked open data,it is possible to utilize these
structures to become more efficient. As a result of this underlying framework the
web itself will evolve to return more accurate data in response to any question
that is posed.
As the world’s largest driver of knowledge,theAcademy has a responsibility to
lead by providing data to better answer queries at all stages of the learning and
educational process.At the current rate of progress,by 2020 all of the developed
world’s research funding bodies will require openness by default.
In this vein,the biggest advancement in 2016 has been the announcement by the
European Commission that all papers and digital objects created as a result of
their funding need to be,‘as open as possible,as closed as necessary’.In terms of
technology to support this,there are several existing solutions that fit the bill.In
terms of outreach,learning and awareness of these changes,it seems as though
there is going to be a very steep learning curve,with some real consequences
for those who ignore the advice of their libraries and research offices.
Social change is always difficult,especially if it has been ingrained for decades,job
security and career advancement are coupled to support the status quo in such
a way as to make the behavior structural. However,change is afoot. Slowly but
surely the research establishment is being driven to reassess its attitudes.
Even if the only argument on offer was to improve the efficiency of research,it
would be difficult to deny that openness is a good thing given how research is
now done. In this respect,even doing as little as openly sharing negative results
would have a profound impact on the research that needs to be performed.But,
this isn’t the only argument:at the time of writing retractionwatch.com listed
684 articles just from PubMed tracked sources in 2015,a 37% rise over 2014.
This represents a tiny percentage of the articles that were published in 2015
but it does make it difficult to sympathize with those who seek to protect their
career progression over the central reason that most people go into science –
namely,to progress the sum of human understanding.
There should be a fundamental social responsibility associated with being
open in the same way that there is now a social responsibility associated with
recycling your garbage or paying your taxes. For those who embrace openness,
there should be a tangible reward and there should be recognition of positive
contributions to the new research paradigm. Without these drivers,research will
remain broken with openness being at odds with funding practice. Institutions
have it within their power to make these changes…the tools are there.
For those who embrace
openness, there should be
a tangible reward and there
should be recognition of
positive contributions to the
new research paradigm.
1 Link it up: http://linkitup.data2semantics.org/
2 A New ‘Research Data Mechanics: https://figshare.com/articles/Digital_Science_White_Paper_A_New_Research_Data_Mechanics_/3514859
3 Data FAIRport: http://www.datafairport.org/Mechanics_/3514859

Why Open Data Now?
Big Data, Knowledge
Production and the Political
Economy of Research
Dr Sabina Leonelli, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology,
Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, UK
When data is used as evidence for scientific claims, the data becomes public
objects, which should be widely scrutinized to assess the validity of the
inferences drawn.Yet, the vast majority of scientific data generated in the 20th
century have only been accessed by small groups of experts; and few of those
data, selected in relation to the inferences made, have been made publicly
available in scientific journals.This is tied to a view of scientific knowledge
production as an esoteric and technical process, where even trained
researchers become so specialized as to be unable to assess data produced
by fields other than their own. Scientists invest time and effort in scrutinizing
data only when they have reason to doubt their colleagues’ interpretation
or suspect foul play; and concerns with data production and interpretation,
including issues associated with the emergence of ‘big data’, remain remote
from global civil society.
Since the start of the new millennium, the open data movement has challenged
this technocratic way of sharing data and their political, social and economic
significance.The movement brings together scientists, policy-makers,
publishers, industry representatives and members of civil society around
the globe who believe that data produced by scientific research should be
made publicly accessible online and freely accessible for reuse by anyone.
The Internet provides a platform for scientists to exchange data, materials
and opinions in real-time, no matter where they are geographically located.
Participants in the open data movement embrace this opportunity.They
typically advocate that data can, and should, travel beyond the specific setting in
which they are generated, thus enhancing the possibility that people who have
not been involved in their production will contribute to their interpretation.
Accordingly, the production of scientific knowledge is portrayed as involving
the centralized collection and ‘mining’ of datasets gathered by different
research communities across the globe. Pooling together results, it is argued,
maximizes the chances of identifying significant patterns in the data that are
collected, and of transforming data into knowledge.This in turn may improve
the quality, accessibility and transparency of research and speed up the rate of
scientific discovery.
Whether research is actually being driven by data, rather than theories,
hypotheses, models or policy challenges, remains disputable.What is clear,
is that data are increasingly conceptualized as inherently valuable products
of scientific research, rather than as components of the research process
They typically advocate
that data can, and should,
travel beyond the specific
setting in which they are
generated, thus enhancing
the possibility that people
who have not been
involved in their production
will contribute to their
interpretation.

which have no value in themselves.This involves viewing data as open to
several possible interpretations, whose validity and usefulness depend on the
questions, interests and materials characterizing the specific context in which
data are adopted. It also involves viewing data as research outputs that can
be published and cited without necessarily having been used as evidence for a
specific claim (as required within traditional journal publications).
Over the last decade, funding agencies such as the National Institute of Health,
National Science Foundation, European Research Council and Research
Councils UK have endorsed this innovative perception of how data should be
managed.They are actively promoting open data as key to the advancement
of basic research and its translation into applications with immediate social
impact, such as therapeutic or agricultural innovations.They are pressuring
their grantees to release data to public databases – a move that affects how
scientists set up their research, and measure and develop their outputs. Many
researchers now invest considerable time and resources into donating data to
public repositories; and regard the consultation of online databases as a first
step towards the development of new lines of inquiry.
Why the open data movement has acquired such prominence in
contemporary scientific and public discourse is an important question.
Given the enormous achievements of 20th century science, where data
sharing was confined to small sections of the (predominantly Western)
scientific community, why are funding bodies insisting on open data as crucial
to 21st century research? A standard answer to this question points to
open data as a crucial way for scientists to exploit the emergence of new
technologies, such as genome sequencing and Internet-based social media.
It is true that the availability and widespread uptake of new information and
communication technologies, as well as the introduction of new methods
of data generation, play a crucial role in making it possible to produce and
share information on the scale advocated by the open data movement.And
yet, the emergence and political impact of the open data movement are
not mere consequences of technological advances in data production and
communication, nor are their implications restricted solely to science.

Scientific concerns underlying the open data movement need to be evaluated
in relation to four other sets of factors.
1. Open data provides a common platform for scientists,
scientific institutions and funders (in both the private and the
public sphere) to discuss and tackle the practical difficulties
involved in making data travel and be re-used. Whether scientific
data are shared,among whom and to what effect,depends on the existence
of appropriate regulatory,social and material infrastructures,such as workable
databases,guidelines on data donation,and servers in safe locations where data
storage can be guaranteed in the long term;as well as well-coordinated networks
of individuals,scientific groups,companies and institutions that take responsibility
for developing,financing and enforcing those infrastructures and the related
instruments,computers and software.The resources and skills required to
achieve such coordination are clearly not only technical,but also social.
2. Open data feeds into concerns with transparency, legitimacy
and return on investment on the part of science policy and
funding bodies. Public institutions responsible for science funding are
under pressure from national and international policy. They have an interest
in fostering public trust in science as a source of reliable knowledge and
thus as a legitimate source of information. Perhaps the most blatant recent
case of public mistrust in science is the controversy following the public
release of emails exchanged by researchers at the Climatic Research Unit
of the University of East Anglia in 2010 (an episode often referred to as
ClimateGate).This was a case where a perceived lack of transparency in how
climate data were handled fuelled social mistrust in the scientific consensus
on global warming.This in turn affected public support for the implementation
of international measures against climate change. Many national governments
and international organizations like the European Research Council support
the free circulation of data in the hope that it will increase the transparency
and accountability of scientific research - and, potentially, its trustworthiness
and social legitimacy. Similarly, the Royal Society has pointed to open data as
an opportunity to prevent scientific fraud and disclose the evidence base for
scientific pronouncements to the general public, so as to avoid the kind of
miscommunication and misunderstanding underlying ClimateGate.
3. Open data aligns with the challenges posed by the
globalization of science to new parts of the world, beyond
traditional centres of Euro-American power. Open data are
implicated in transforming the geographies of science and its relation to
local economies, as illustrated by the rise of centres of research excellence
in the global South. Institutes such as the Beijing Genomics Institute, interact
with researchers across the globe largely through digital means, and do
not see themselves as requiring the support of extensive local or even
national research infrastructure and traditions.Thanks to widespread data
dissemination over the Internet, they can quickly learn from results produced
elsewhere and contribute their own share of data to international
databases and research projects, thus gaining visibility and competing with
established programmes in the United States, Japan and Europe. Nations
that have not figured as prominent producers of scientific knowledge
throughout the 20th century, such as China, South Africa, India and

Singapore, are devoting increasing financial support to research, in the hope
of attracting a highly skilled workforce to boost their industrial productivity
and economic prospects.
One might think that laboratories in poor or underfunded regions would
strongly support data sharing, for it makes data produced with expensive
technology accessible to them, raising their chance to produce cutting-edge
science; and that rich laboratories, which regard the possession of such
technologies as providing them with a competitive edge, would be reluctant to
donate data – particularly since donation requires additional labour. However,
taking account of the considerable resources and diverse expertise needed
to transform data into new knowledge helps to acquire a more realistic view
on the benefits and costs of data sharing. Underfunded laboratories actually
struggle to access online resources, appropriate bandwidth, adequate expertise
and computers powerful enough to analyze data found online; and are coming
to terms with the difficulties involved in developing resources and standards
for data donation. By contrast, many rich laboratories have found that data
donation offers the opportunity to participate in international networks and
receive help with data analysis, thus accruing their own prestige, visibility and
productivity. Even major pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline and
Syngenta are contributing to the development of public databases, in the hope
of outsourcing their RD efforts, improving their public image and gaining
from the availability of data produced through public funding.
4. Open data exemplifies the embedding of scientific research
in market logics and contexts. To make it at all feasible for data to
travel,market structures and political institutions need to assess not only their
scientific value,but also their value as political,financial and social objects.The
increased mobility of data is unavoidably tied to their commodification.The very
idea of scientific data as artefacts that can be traded,circulated across the globe
and re-used to create new forms of value is indissolubly tied to market logics,
with data figuring as objects of market exchange.National governments and
industries that have invested heavily in data production – through the financing
of clinical trials or genome sequencing projects – are keen to see results.This
requirement to maximize returns from past investments,and the urgency
typically attached to it,fuels the emphasis on data needing to travel widely and
fast to create knowledge that would positively impact human health.
Further, the open dissemination and reuse of data not only challenges notions
of competition and property within established scientific communities, but
also notions of property, privacy and effective communication in industry,
government and civil society.
Data acquired from patients in clinical trials or participants in personalized
genomics, for instance, have clear economic value, and some companies
welcome the opportunity to access personal information unwittingly
circulated by citizens who are not aware of its value as ‘data’ for medical
research – a move widely disputed by legal scholars, advocacy groups and
medical associations as an infringement of privacy.The dissemination of data
of relevance to innovation in food security or bioenergy, such as molecular
data on plants and plant pathogens, is similarly plagued by uncertainties
about intellectual property, particularly in cases of public-private partnerships
between governmental agencies and companies such as Monsanto or Shell.

Rajan1
(2006) and Kelty2
(2008) have shown how free data access has greatly
helped to maximize exchange and downstream capital flows. At the same
time, data mobility is not free in the sense of being devoid of financial and
social costs. Data sharing requires human resources and capital: even the
most successful initiatives are confronted with the exponential costs involved
in maintaining and expanding data infrastructures in the long-term, and are
struggling to produce sustainable business plans for their activities. Indeed,
the European Union has denounced the costs associated with funding the
current plurality of online databases in biomedicine as unsustainable in the
long term, and is pushing for the centralization of facilities for data sharing
as a possible solution (most prominently through ELIXIR, a gigantic effort
currently underway at the European Bioinformatics Institute to coordinate
and eventually integrate data sharing initiatives in biology and medicine; see
the ELIXIR website: http://www.elixir-europe.org/ ).The National Science
Foundation, which funded many successful data sharing initiatives at the turn of
the millennium, is also attempting to rationalize its investments in this area and
is now asking database curators to provide self-sustaining business models.
A critical assessment of the significance of the open data movement for
contemporary society at large needs to take account of all these factors,
which foreground the indissoluble ties of scientific research to global political
economy.The emergence of technologies and related expertise that facilitate
the production and dissemination of biological data on a large scale is certainly
a key reason for the visibility and political support garnered by the open
data movement in recent years. In turn, the development of technologies
and expertise for the care of data, not to mention their production and use
to create new biomedical knowledge and interventions, is made possible by
the availability of institutions that help to define the financial value of data
as commodities and the conditions under which data can be made to travel
around the globe.What has propelled data into becoming protagonists of
contemporary biomedicine is their ambiguous status as at once local and
global, free commodities and strategic investments, common goods and
grounds for competition, potential evidence and meaningless information.
Openness, defined through the opportunities for dissemination associated
with the Internet, is a defining characteristic of ‘big data’ science, policy and
infrastructure.The vision underlying the open data movement is that data risk
to remain meaningless if they are prevented from travelling far and wide, and
that travel endows data with multiple forms of scientific as well as financial,
social and political value.
Article adapted from: Leonelli, S. (2013)Why the Current Insistence on Open
Access to Scientific Data? Big Data, Knowledge Production and the Political
Economy of Contemporary Biology. Bulletin of Science,Technology and Society
33(1/2): 6-11.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0270467613496768
The vision underlying the
open data movement is
that data risk to remain
meaningless if they are
prevented from travelling
far and wide.
1 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. 2006. Biocapital:The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2 Kelty, Christopher M. 2008.Two Bits:The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Duke University Press.

Open Season for Open Data:
A Survey of Researchers
Dr Briony Fane, Metrics Researcher, Jon Treadway, Director
Operational Strategy, Digital Science
Anna Gallagher, Research Analyst, Dan Penny, Head of
Market Intelligence: Researchers and Audience, Springer Nature
Dr Mark Hahnel, CEO, Figshare
Figshare has garnered many insights from its users in the past,from formal surveys
and informal feedback. However,these have been directed toward the working of
its product,rather than the state of open data in the research sector as a whole.
Working with Springer Nature and Digital Science,we surveyed researchers about
their attitude and experiences in working with data,sharing it and making it open.
The response rate was very strong,surpassing our best expectations;over 2,000
researchers responded to the survey,spread across continents and disciplines,
from all types of institution and researchers at different career stages.
The survey reveals a number of compelling insights,some of which we present
here - it is pleasing to note that the sector is far from procrastinating when it
comes to open data.
1. For the majority of respondents, open data is already a reality
Researchers are aware of open data -Approximately three quarters of
respondents are aware of data sets that are open to access,reuse,
repurpose and redistribute (Figure 1).
Researchers in the social sciences demonstrate the highest level of
awareness by subject area (Figure 2),while,by geography,researchers inAsia
demonstrate the least familiarity (Figure 3).
Figure 1 - Awareness of data that is free to access,
reuse,repurpose and redistribute,n=1915
Figure 2 - Awareness of data that is free to access,
reuse,repurpose and redistribute,by subject area,
n=1436

Figure 3 - Respondents who are aware of
data that is free to access, reuse, repurpose
and redistribute, by continent and by
country where n20, n=1915
Researchers are making data openly available -Approximately three quarters
of respondents have made research data open at some point;of these,24%
do so frequently and 33% do so sometimes (Figure 4).
Researchers are reusing open data in their own research -A clear majority of
respondents have reused data made open by other researchers (Figure 5);
and that data was important to them over 80% of the time (Figure 6).
Figure 4 - Regularity with which respondents
have made data free to access,reuse,
repurpose and redistribute,n=1869
Figure 5 - Respondents who have reused
data made free by others,n=1777
Figure 6 - Importance of freely available data
to those who have reused it,n=1006
Fig6
Fig 4 Fig 6 Fig 5
Researchers place value on credit they receive for making data open - Nearly 70%
of researchers value a data citation as much an article citation. A further 10%
value a data citation more than an article citation.Only 2% do not place any
value on a data citation (Figure 7).
Figure 7 - Value placed on data citations,
n=1714

While the average across all respondents in all countries was just under 75%
from countries in which we received a significant number of respondents,
we found that developed research economies typically had 80%-90% of
respondents replying that they were aware of open data. The top countries
were Netherlands,Russia and Denmark withAustralia,Switzerland,Argentina
and Greece all scoring in the high-80 or low-90 percentiles. The US,Germany
and the UK (the three largest producers of research publications) scored 79%,
82% and 82% respectively. Among the most developed research countries,the
lowest levels of awareness were found in France (64%),Czech Republic (63%)
and Italy (60%).
It is interesting to note that awareness of open data transcended age and
career progression for the most part,with principal investigators and professors
consistently scoring similarly to PhD students and post-doctoral fellows.
Clinically-oriented colleagues tended to be less aware and those involved in
research administration where,perhaps unsurprisingly,more aware.
2. Respondents admit to uncertainty and gaps in their
knowledge; they want to know more
Researchers do not know how open they have made their data - 60% of respondents
are unsure about the licensing conditions under which they have shared their
data,and thus the extent to which it can be accessed or reused (Figure 8).
Figure 8 - Licenses used by respondents to
make data freely available, n=1015

Researchers are uncertain as to who will meet the costs of making data open - 39%
of researchers cannot identify a source of funds which will enable them to
make data openly available (Figure 9); younger researchers in particular are
uncertain as to where funds will come from.
A consistent proportion of researchers do not know what is required of them -Around
20% of researchers do not know whether their funders require them to make
their data open.25% do not know about their institution’s requirements,and
31% do not know about publisher’s requirements (Figure 10).
Respondents display remarkable consistency in their awareness of open data
policies,irrespective of the stakeholder concerned (Figure 11).
Figure 10 - Respondent’s awareness of open data
policies,by Funder n=1451,by Institution n=1338,
by Publisher,n=1401
Figure 11 - Consistency of respondent’s awareness
of Institution,Publisher and Funder open data
policies,n=1252
Figure 9 - Respondent’s knowledge of
source of funds for making data openly
available,n=1554

Researchers would like more guidance - Over half of respondents said that they
would welcome more guidance on compliance with their funder’s policy, with
the desire for more information evenly distributed across those who have
shared data openly in the past and those who have not.The desire is strongly
correlated with age; and those in Asia are more likely to want more guidance
than those in Europe or North America (Figure 12).
Researchers are uncertain of how to cite datasets;their lack of confidence reflects
their attitude towards open data - Less than half of respondents say they are
extremely or very confident in how to cite a secondary research dataset;
confidence levels correlate strongly with the value respondents place on data
citations,how frequently they have previously shared data openly and whether
they have used open data themselves (Figure 13).
While there is clearly a lot to understand about how data sharing works in
practice,there are still many unanswered questions: What should be made open?
What should be curated? How to cite data that you’ve used? Provenance and
production principles? It is also clear that subject-based approaches to open data
are key in changing perceptions and training the coming generations of researchers.
There are deep seated reasons for not sharing - some are cultural and some are
systemic. Spending time to understand local subject-based effects will give us a
clear path to tackle the blockers to openness.
Figure 12 - Respondents desire for
more guidance on meeting funder
requirements, by data sharers n=1572,
by age n=1428, by continent n=1430
Figure 13 - Level of confidence when citing
secondary datasets by data sharers n=1737,
value placed on data citation n=1714,
reuse of data n=1577

3. We have some indication as to what the future holds, and it
will be more open
Researchers who have never made data openly available are considering doing so -
Of respondents who have not made any data open to date,44% will definitely
consider doing so in the future,and a further 46% might consider doing so
(Figure 14).
Even researchers who have never made data open are reusing data made open by
others - 35% of respondents reluctant to share data openly have reused open
data in their work (Figure 15).
Figure 14 - For respondents who have never
made data freely open,willingness to do so in
future,n=233
made data freely open to date,whether
they have reused data others have made
freely available,n=427

Of those who have not reused open data,two thirds would consider doing so in
the future (Figure 16).
Regional differences exist and are likely to persist - NorthAmerican respondents
who have not made data open in the past or reused open data are most likely
to do so in the future; Asian respondents are least likely to do so in both cases
(Figures 17 18).
Figure 18 -Willingness of respondents who
have never made data freely open to do so
in the future, by continent, n=287
Figure 17 - Respondents
who have never made data
freely open or reused data
that others have made
freely available - willingness
to reuse data in the future,
by continent, n=161
made data freely open to date nor reused
data others have made freely available,
willingness to reuse data in future,n=228

The appendix contains more detailed breakdowns from the survey. The data
highlights many traits which correlate with how often respondents have made
their data open and have reused open data themselves.
If a respondent has made their data open or reused open data,they are more
likely to:
1. Be aware of freely available data
2. Have experience of producing Data Management Plans
3. Produce large files from their research
4. Produce large numbers of files from their research
5. See file versioning as key to their research
6. Know where funds will come from to make data open
7. Actively annotate their data
8. Use Figshare and Github, versus other tools for sharing data
9. Collaborate with other researchers
At Figshare,we have long contended that big data,while capturing the zeitgeist,
is not the big problem that people think it is in the open data community. Big
data tends to attract big attention and sometimes even big funding. That means
that the problems of big data transfer,storage,provenance and a hundred
other issues have been examined. The reason that we have the Internet,
grid computing and ultra-fast graphics processes is all related to the big data
revolution. Our data from this survey shows that correspondingly,it is more
likely that you will share your data if you produce gigabytes of data rather than
megabytes of data and more likely again if you produce terabytes (or more)
compared with gigabytes. So,we still need to solve the“long tail” or“small data”
problem. Only 22% of researchers producing megabytes of data share their data.
Yet this is where most of the diverse and interesting data is:the negative results;
the figures that didn’t make it into the paper;the valuable runs of data that never
made it into the tables that were published.
The survey and anonymized responses are both available on Figshare for reuse.
We hope that the results provide the sector with a foundation to track the
evolution of how researchers will deal with data in the coming years.
Only 22% of researchers
producing megabytes of
data share their data.Yet
this is where most of the
diverse and interesting
data is: the negative
results; the figures that
didn’t make it into the
paper; the valuable runs
of data that never made
it into the tables that
were published.

Open Data Will Save Lives
– Notes from the AllTrials
Campaign for Clinical
TrialsTransparency
Dr Till Bruckner, AllTrials campaign manager, London
Beth Ellis, Intern at Sense about Science, London
Discussions around open data can sound dry and boring. Often, they proceed
from an abstract starting point – “transparency is good” – straight into highly
technical discussions about software platforms, data scraping tools and a
plethora of acronyms, leaving bystanders to wonder why they should care.
Here at the global AllTrials campaign for clinical trials transparency, we mobilize
support around a far more compelling message: Opacity in medical research
kills, and open data can save lives.
Clinical trials are at the heart of modern medical research.They are the best
way we have of testing whether a medicine is safe and effective. Around the
world, pharmaceutical companies, universities, government research institutes,
foundations and charities conduct tens of thousands of trials a year to test
new drugs, devices and treatments. Some of these trials can involve thousands
of patients and take years to complete.
The problem is that the results of around half of all clinical trials currently
remain hidden1
because they are not posted or published anywhere.There
is no complete list of all clinical trials, so we do not even know that some
trials have taken place, never mind what was found in them.As a result, a huge
amount of medical research goes to waste.2
Potentially valuable findings are
lost, different research teams unknowingly duplicate each other’s work, and
gaps in knowledge are hard to identify.This has a direct impact on doctors’ and
patients’ abilities to make informed choices about treatment options.
Dr Aus Alzaid at his practice in Saudi Arabia, treats many patients with
diabetes.There is a commonly observed link between diabetes and
Alzheimer’s disease, so he decided to examine the medical literature to see
if any of the medications used to treat diabetes affected memory or caused
dementia.The evidence on metformin, a widely used diabetes drug, seemed
conflicting, with some studies showing a higher risk of dementia while others
reported exactly the opposite.“The fact that the verdict on metformin was
uncertain was somewhat unsettling for me,” he wrote in a blog.3
“I didn’t
want to give my patients anything to lower blood sugar if it meant them
losing their minds too!”
Opacity in medical
research kills, and open
data can save lives.

Dr Alzaid discovered that a randomized, placebo-controlled, multi-year clinical
trial had been conducted years earlier to study whether metformin caused
dementia; but that its results had never been made public.“In the meantime,
millions of people were taking the drug and could be at risk of dementia
unless the work was published,” he explained.The lead investigator of the trial
eventually did publish the results – but only several years after the trial had
been completed, and after having been prompted multiple times by Dr Alzaid.
Compounding the problem of non-reporting of results are systematic biases
in the population of results that are reported.Academic researchers find it
difficult to get the results of trials that yield negative results published in high
impact academic journals. Research shows that trials with negative results are
twice as likely to remain unreported as those with positive results.
The most (in)famous example is Study 3294
, a clinical trial of the antidepressant
drug paroxetine conducted with teenage volunteers.A 2001 academic
paper5
based on the trial claimed that “Paroxetine is generally well tolerated
and effective for major depression in adolescents.” However, a subsequent
analysis6
by an independent research group showed a marked increase in
suicidal behaviour among participants in the trial. Further scrutiny7
of data
from a wider range of trials suggested8
that pharmaceutical companies had
under-reported9
instances of suicide in the documents they had submitted to
regulators when applying for licenses to sell antidepressants.These revelations
led to a series of court cases. In 2012, one of the companies involved agreed to
pay a $3 billion fine10
as part of a wider settlement.
In order to solve the problem of missing and biased trial evidence, the AllTrials
campaign calls for all clinical trials – past, present and future – to be registered,
and their methods and results to be fully reported. (Please note that AllTrials
does not actively campaign for individual patient data sharing, a separate open
data issue that is currently being hotly debated in medical research circles.)
AllTrials is campaigning for a future research landscape in which:
• all clinical trials are registered, with a full trial protocol, so that researchers
can see exactly who is investigating what and nobody can bury
unwelcome findings.
• a summary of results are posted where a trial was registered within one year
of completion of a trial, so that other researchers, doctors like Dr Azaid, and
their patients can find out what each trial discovered.
• all trial reports are posted online in full, with only minimal redactions, so that
independent researchers can check whether their methodology was sound
and their findings correctly presented.
• all the findings of trials conducted in the past are made available - most of the
medicines we take today were developed decades ago.
In recent years, the medical research community has already made huge
strides in the right direction. Rising awareness of the immense human (and
financial11
) cost of hidden trials has spurred governments, regulators, research

institutions and professional bodies into action. Governments have set up
online clinical study registers to facilitate trial registration and results sharing.
Trial registration and reporting is rapidly becoming seen as a must, both
ethically and legally.
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has voluntarily committed12
to
being transparent with its clinical trial data,“...to help advance scientific
understanding and inform medical judgment”.The International Committee
of Medical Journal Editors has announced that it will no longer publish papers
based on non-registered trials. In the UK, anyone planning to run a clinical
trial must commit to registering it in order to receive ethics approval. Laws
and regulations in the European Union, the United States and beyond are
consistently evolving towards mandating greater clinical trial transparency13
.
An initiative called OpenTrials14
is about to launch a platform integrating data
from multiple trial registers to make it easier to locate trials and their results.
Large gaps remain, notably regarding trials conducted in the past, but
the trend towards more open data in the sector is clear.To maintain and
accelerate this positive momentum, the AllTrials campaign keeps repeating
the same mantra to patients, doctors, researchers, regulators and politicians:
Open data in medical research matters to you – because it can save lives,
including your own.
Open data in medical
research matters to you –
because it can save lives,
including your own.
Image kindly provided by Sense about Science
1 http://www.alltrials.net/news/half-of-all-trials-unreported/
2 http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-chalmers-is-85-of-health-research-really-wasted/
3 http://www.alltrials.net/news/diabetes-alzheimer-link-clinical-trials/
4 https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730394-500-new-look-at-antidepressant-suicide-risks-from-infamous-trial/
5 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11437014
6 http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4320
7 http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i65
8 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/
9 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/antidepressants-can-raise-the-risk-of-suicide-biggest-ever-revie/
10 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/business/glaxosmithkline-agrees-to-pay-3-billion-in-fraud-settlement.html
11 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/10/tamiflu-saga-drug-trials-big-pharma
12 http://www.alltrials.net/supporters/organisations/gsk-statement/
13 http://www.alltrials.net/news/un-calls-for-global-action-on-clinical-trial-transparency/
14 http://www.alltrials.net/news/opentrials-clinical-trials-transparency/

Practical Steps for
Increasing the Openness
and Reproducibility of
Research Data
Natalie K. Meyers, MA, MLIS, Partnerships and Collaborations
Manager, Center for Open Science, USA
This State of Open Data report provides a much needed snapshot of
open data sharing practices today and provides a timely complement to a
previous study: Science Gateways Today and Tomorrow: Positive
perspectives of nearly 5,000 members of the research community1
.Taken
together these two surveys paint a broad picture of those producing, re-
using, and making research data more open. It is encouraging to see in this
burgeoning context that most major metrics are improving. 74% of State of
The Data survey respondents have made research data open at some point,
and of respondents who have never done so, 90% would consider making data
open in the future.This interest closely echoes the Science Gateways survey,
where 75% of respondents indicated that data collections were important to
their research/education work, ranking it highly alongside data analysis tools
and computational tools (72% each) and their interest in being able to rapidly
publish and/or find domain-specific articles and data (69%).
The Center for Open Science(COS)2
convenes reproducibility focused efforts
like theTransparency and Openness Promotion (TOP).3
TOP provides eight
actionable steps journals and organizations can take to reward best practices
in open, reproducible science with increasing rigor4
. COS also incentivizes
transparency through Open Data, Open Materials, and Open Practices Badges5
.
To provide infrastructure COS offers the Open Science Framework (OSF) an
open-source platform that enables collaborative, transparent and reproducible
work.You can find out more about OSF and COS's many initiatives at cos.io.
COS has prepared the following list of five practical steps for increasing the
openness and reproducibility of research data to inspire more transparent
research practices:
1. The first step is to get informed and stay informed - Educate
yourself with primers and quick-study guides:
• 23Things: Libraries for Research Data7
will help you start learning and keep
up with trends in open data sharing.
• For Social Scientists, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social
Research (ICPSR) also offers a very complete Guide to Social Science Data
Preparation and Archiving: Best Practice.8

• DataONE offers a Best Practices Primer9
for those new to data management
and a Best Practices database10
where users can select an area of the research
lifecycle diagram they want to learn more about.
2. The second step is planning - Data Management Plans, Pre-analysis
Plans Pre Registration:
• A Data Management Plan (DMP) describes how you will acquire or
generate data, how you will manage, describe, analyze, and store those data,
and finally how you will preserve and make available your data. Many funders
require data management plans. The DMPTool11
and DMPonline12
are two
among a number of helpful tools for collaboratively authoring compliant
plans aligned with funder requirements.
• A Pre-analysis Plan is a detailed description of the analysis to be
conducted written in advance of seeing the data. It may specify hypotheses
to be tested, variable construction, equations to be estimated, controls to
be used, and other aspects of the analysis.The Registry for International
Development Impact Evaluations (RIDIE) has a pre-analysis checklist helpful
to those writing pre-analysis plans13
.
• Registered Reports Preregistration can increase the credibility
of hypothesis testing by confirming in advance what will be analyzed and
reported, and even accepted for a journal article. Researchers can reduce
the file drawer effect, prevent biased data analysis, and engage in peer review
before results are known with Preregistration14
and Registered Reports15
.
3. The third step is using data management best practices
during data collection analysis:
Accurately describe and report your research
• Thoroughly describe methods providing open materials
where possible. Remember to provide sufficient explanation for an
independent researcher to understand how your materials relate to your
reported methodology.
• Clearly distinguish between confirmatory (hypothesis testing)
versus exploratory (hypothesis generating) analyses. Both are
important for scientific discovery.
• Make clear your effect size and confidence interval reporting
• Use machine readable community standards for metadata
appropriate for your discipline and information systems.
Make data files code understandable by documenting data
and code as you work. Create and keep up-to-date: clearly labeled
variables,codebooks,data dictionaries,well-documented and shareable
software/scripts.

Track Preserve digital files, computational workflow and/or data analysis
• Employ version control, registration, and documentation features during data
collection and analysis.
• Adopt and consistently use file naming conventions
• Employ literate programming methods
• Create re-usable, shareable workflows and consider containerizing work
with docker-centric tools to preserve your software and platforms.
4. The fourth step is to share and archive data and materials:
• Use open file formats to share and archive data to meet funder,
publisher or repository requirements. If your discipline or toolsuite produces
data in proprietary formats, if appropriate use conversion tools to create a
parallel set of data in an open format. Preserve them along with the native
file formats.
• Claim a permanent author identifier like an ORCID17
and/
or ResearcherID18
. This helps distinguish you from other authors and
is increasingly integrated into manuscript and grant submission systems’
automated linkages.
• Deposit and preserve data in an open repository: Funders
may specify a preferred repository, affiliated organizations may provide
an institutional repository, or there may be a disciplinary repository that
provides the widest audience for your data. Re3data19
maintains a registry of
repositories and sharing platforms so you can find research data repositories
most appropriate for your work.
The abiding steps are to identify where to seek expert
help and to get to know proximal and aspirational peer
communities:
•The library is a good start. Most research libraries have data management
consultancies. In 2013, 74% of responding U.S. and Canadian libraries in
a survey of the Association of Research Libraries reported offering such
services, and 23% of the others reported they were planning to begin
offering such services20
.
• Identify disciplinary, government agency, and collaborative organizations
aligned with your research to seek expert help and be informed by your
peers, like: Berkeley Initiative forTransparency in the Social Sciences
(BITTS)21
, CODATA22
, Data Curation Centre23
,DataONE24
,Data and Software
Preservation for Open Science(DASPOS)25
, Federation of Earth Science
Information Partners (ESIP)26
, ICPSR27
, Society for Improving Psychological
Science (SIPS)28
. Browsing the lists of SHARE29
andTOP30
signatories and
contributors is another way to find aligned communities of practice.

•The Research Data Alliance31
convenes an international group from
111 countries and provides a neutral space where its 4,000+ members
come together online and in bi-annual plenaries across domain, research,
geographical and generational boundaries to develop and adopt infrastructure
that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research .This diversity of
membership ensures you can find an expert and/or identify quickly with a
community of practice at RDA.
Improving the reproducibility of research literature is a complex challenge,
that will be most effectively accomplished through the collective will of
researchers, data managers, publishers, universities, professional societies, and
funding agencies pulling together around best practices.
1 Science gateways today and tomorrow: Positive perspectives of nearly 5,000 members of the research community.(2015) by Lawrence, KA, Zentner, M,
Wilkins-Diehr, N,Wernert, JA, Pierce, M, Marru, S, Michael, S. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 2015, DOI: 10.1002/cpe.3526.
2 Center for Open Science Available: https://cos.io/
3Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines https://cos.io/top/
4 IncentivizingTransparency by Mellor, D. Editorial Office News 2016Vol. 9 (8), DOI: 10.18243/eon/2016.9.8.1
5 Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices Available: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/home/
6 Open Science Framework Available: https://osf.io
7 23Things: Libraries for Research byWitt, M., RDA Libraries for Research Data Interest Group. DOI:10.15497/RDA00005
8 Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving: Best PracticeThroughout the Data Life Cycle (5th ed.). Inter-university Consortium for
Political and Social Research (ICPSR). (2012).Ann Arbor, MI.Available: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/ICPSR/access/dataprep.pdf
9 DataONE Best Practices Primer Available: https://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE_BP_Primer_020212.pdf
10 DataONE Best Practices Database Available: https://www.dataone.org/best-practices#search
11 DMPTool Available: https://dmptool.org/
12 DMPonline Available: https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk/
13 Analysis Plan Checklist RIDIE Registration Help.
Available: http://ridie.3ieimpact.org/index.php?r=site/pageview=registrationHelp#AnalysisPlanFileId_Section
14 Preregistration Challenge Available: https://cos.io/prereg/
15 Registered Reports Available: https://cos.io/rr
16 Literate programming by Knuth, D. The Computer Journal (1984) 27(2): 97-111.doi: 10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97
17 ORCID Available: http://orcid.org/
18 ResearcherID Available: http://www.researcherid.com/
19 Registry of Research Data Repositories Available: http://www.re3data.org/
20 SPEC Kit 334: Research Data Management Services by Fearon, D; Gunia, B; Lake, S; Pralle, BE; Sallans,A. (July 2013)
Available: http://publications.arl.org/Research-Data-Management-Services-SPEC-Kit-334/
21 Berkeley Initiative forTransparency in the Social Sciences Available: http://www.bitss.org/
22 International Council for Science : Committee on Data for Science andTechnology (CODATA) Available: http://www.codata.org/
23 Data Curation Centre (DCC) Available: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
24 DataONE Available: https://www.dataone.org/
25 Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS) Available: https://daspos.crc.nd.edu
26 Federation of Earth Science Professionals (ESIP) Available: http://www.esipfed.org/
27 Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Available: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/
28 Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) Available: http://improvingpsych.org/
29 SHARE Available: https://share.osf.io/sources
30TOP Signatories Available: https://cos.io/top/#list
31 Research Data Alliance Available: https://www.rd-alliance.org/

Emerging Policies for
Open Research Data
in the United States
Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC,
Washington DC, USA
Background
In the United States, the federal government invests approximately $60 billion
each year on basic and applied scientific research with the expectation that
this investment will stimulate new ideas, accelerate scientific discovery, fuel
innovation, grow the economy, create jobs, and, in general, improve the welfare
and well-being of the public. Increasingly, research funders have recognized
that by ensuring the outputs of this research – including data – can be freely
accessed and fully used by the widest possible audience, progress towards
these goals can be significantly accelerated. U.S. policymakers have also
recognized, that in an era where improving the transparency and accountability
of government has taken center stage, the need to create a policy framework
that effectively supports all stakeholders in a transition to a more open system
of sharing research results.
Policy Precedent and Evolution
The United States has a long history of information policy precedents that
have created a strong foundation for the creation of an effective research
data-sharing framework. Dating back to the mid-1960s, key policies have
been issued which have become progressively more explicit in articulating
expectations for sharing government-produced/funded information, ranging
from the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, to the Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) Circular No.A-130 in 1985, toThe Digital Accountability
andTransparency Act (DATA Act) recently passed by Congress in 2014.
While none of these policies specifically targeted digital research data, and
many were drafted prior to the advent of the Internet, they nonetheless have
played a key role in helping to define expectations for sharing data of all kinds.
OMB Circular A-130, in particular, clearly outlines key principles for sharing
government information of all kinds, and speaks to the heart of the current
objectives of U.S. federal research funders, noting:

“…Government information is a valuable national resource,and the economic
benefits to society are maximized when government information is available in a
timely and equitable manner to all,”and further calling for“Open and unrestricted
access to public information at no more than the cost of dissemination...”

This has proven to be an extremely useful foundation for U.S. research funders
to build data sharing policies upon, and one that the Obama Administration
has taken full advantage of. On his first day in office in January 2009, President
Obama issued a sweeping Open Government Directive, outlining guidelines
promoting transparent and participatory government.The first concrete step
that agencies were required to take was to publish government information
online and in open formats to increase its accessibility and utility to the public.
They have continued to issue ever-more granular policies focusing on all types
of digital government data, culminating in a 2013 Executive Order making
“Open and Machine Readable” the default for all government data. Just a few
months later, this administration honed directly in on research data, with an
additional Directive from the Office of Science andTechnology Policy (OSTP)
requiring public access to all federally funded research outputs.
Current Policy Environment
The OSTP Directive has been a landmark in U.S. research data policy
development. It set out, for the first time, specific requirements for U.S.
research funders to develop policies to make all digital data resulting from
unclassified research supported by U.S. federal funding “accessible for the
public to search, retrieve, and analyze.” (Figure 19).
The Directive provides an interesting window into the current state of
research data sharing policies and reflects the deep diversity of data generated
in various research disciplines, as it, understandably, contains a high-level
of ambiguity and what often seem to be contradictory directions. For
example, the Directive tasks agencies with the goal of “maximizing access
to data,” while still fully protecting confidentiality and personal privacy;
recognizing proprietary interests, business confidential information and IP
rights; and balancing value of long-term preservation and access with costs
and administrative burdens.These apparent contradictions actually serve
as important – and useful - indicator of areas where tension between the
potential benefits of full open sharing of data runs directly into potential
negative consequences of such sharing. In order to solve this problem,
additional input from the research community will be required.
Figure 19 - From Figshare's Open Data
Survey: North American respondents who
have been government funded who have
made data freely available or reused
open data.

Currently, draft or final research data sharing policies have been released by 15
of the 19 U.S. science agencies covered by the OSTP Directive. It’s also clear
from their content that creating final policies will be an evolutionary process,
requiring significant community involvement and input to iterate towards
working policies. Unlike in many other cases, creating research data sharing
policies will not be a “one-and-done” policy drafting process.
All of the policies released differ somewhat both in interpretation of the
OSTP guidelines, as well as in the implementation processes that they
propose, however, there are a lot of significant commonalities. Most of the
U.S. agency policies:
• require the submission of data management plans at the proposal stage
• provide direction for approved locations for data deposit/storage
• acknowledge the need for routine attribution for data
• require the creation of agency inventories of data to aid discovery
• support public and private collaboration to achieve aims of data
sharing policies
• recognize the need for robust long-term preservation strategies
There is not yet a common set of standards for any of these policy
components. For example, while all agencies require data management plans
to be submitted at funding proposal stage, we don’t have a common set of
attributes and expectations for these plans.This will likely be addressed as
agencies work through additional community consultations. In the short term,
this will make policy implementation more labor intensive for both the funders
and recipients to comply with.
With a high level of ambiguity still a hallmark of these emerging policies there
is also an undercurrent of concern over compliance confusion from the
institutions that are the primary recipients of federal research funding.There is
also a general willingness on their part to work together with funders and the
wider community on solutions to decrease compliance friction.
What can we do to keep things moving in right direction?
This complex and somewhat volatile environment highlights the need for
regular and close collaboration not only among funders, but also with the
academic and research community.There is a need to evolve research
data sharing policies at paces and in directions that are acceptable to and
sustainable by the research enterprise.
It also underscores the necessity of an evolutionary approach in order to
produce effective research data policies for different disciplines.An approach
that emphasizes regular pilots to test assumptions, and includes mechanisms to
gather and incorporate community feedback on those pilots could be effective
in this environment.

“Harmonizing” policy components across U.S. Federal agencies wherever
possible to reduce operating friction should be a key shared goal. Creating
consistent policy components, and ongoing interagency collaboration on
implementation requirements, is also vital for the ultimate success of
these policies.
We need to be able to effectively support and sustain the infrastructure
needed to make data sharing a reality.Additional investments in the
infrastructure needed to support access to and use of research data for the
long term is essential.We must build an effective, sustainable infrastructure
needed to support our vital national collective interests, and this will require
the community to work together to secure additional investments to ensure
we can achieve the laudable objectives of our emerging open research data
sharing policies.
We need to be able to
effectively support and
sustain the infrastructure
needed to make data
sharing a reality.

BuildingTrust -The State of
Open Data in Burkina Faso
Malick Tapsoba, Deputy Manager, Burkina Open Data
Initiative, Agence Nationale de Promotion des TIC (ANPTIC)
Burkina Faso, ranked as one of the poorest countries in the world, is the first
African francophone country to take positive steps to bring significant, social,
economic and environmental benefits to its population via an open data
initiative.The initiative, Burkina Open Data Initiative’ (BODI), is paving the way
to successfully creating an open data environment, making available a wide
range of datasets in a reusable format from sources including government,
private sector and civil society.The data can be accessed and reused to bring
added value through the creation of new services and improved service
provisions in the country.
Since March 2013, BODI has been engaged in a process of releasing and
making open non-sensitive data collected by public institutions to increase
public access to information on key social policies and services.Three years
since the start of this open data initiative, we take a look at the situation in
Burkina Faso across a number of areas.
1. Data release
Burkina Faso government departments and institutions have a tradition of
publishing data in the form of a statistical yearbook generated as part of their
daily activities.This is a very significant publication for the country but has
shortcomings in that: i) the yearbook does not provide an exhaustive list of
institutional and ministerial data; ii) some of the yearbooks are not published
in a reusable format; iii) some yearbooks are in the form of reports with
statistical tables buried within them; and, iv) not all yearbooks are centralized.
The aims of the BODI project are to establish a catalogue for data collected
by the ministry and institutions, and collect, process and publish the data, on
a central platform, which can be re-used. So far the project has managed to
create a central portal of data accessible at http://data.gov.bf; collect a large
mass of government and civil society data; and, process and publish more than
260 directly reusable datasets.
2. On the reuse of data
BODI provides excellent examples of how data is being shared and reused in
Burkina Faso. For example:
Open Elections - For the first time, the results of the 2015 Presidential
election in Burkina Faso were made openly available in real-time.The official
election website showed live results by district for each presidential candidate,
and which candidate was leading in each of the provinces. Using ‘Open
The initiative, Burkina
Open Data Initiative’
(BODI), is paving the way
to successfully creating an
open data environment.

Election’, a mobile-responsive web based application run by BODI, anyone
could follow the emerging results of the elections in Burkina Faso in 2015
and 2016. Partners of this initiative include the Open Data Institute and the
World Bank. Open Election has contributed to the organization of free,
transparent and accepted elections in Burkina Faso. The site allows users
to follow the results of the presidential and legislative elections in 2015 and
municipal elections in 2016 in Burkina Faso. Africa has a history of disputed
election results and this application has contributed to the organization
of free, transparent and accepted elections by all. The application has also
enabled Burkina Faso to be invited to several international events to share its
experience regarding: Open Data and Elections.
‘Our Schools our Data’ Nos Ecoles Nos Donnée (NENDO) http://nendo.
data.gov.bf) gives a detailed outline of educational structures in Burkina Faso
and has developed a decision tool for education stakeholders.The tool allows
users to find data on the education system at school level, including pass rates,
gender ratios, and presence of running water.The application was highlighted
during OpenDataCon 2015 as one of the best examples of data reuse in the
world by theVice-President of theWorld Bank for Africa, Mr. Makhtar Diop.
CARTEAU-BF is a decision support tool for all water stakeholders,
from government to end users of these water points and sanitation through
technical and financial partners. It aims to provide in real time the situation of
water and sanitation in Burkina to enable better decision making.
With CARTEAU:
• the government has a tool to measure the effectiveness of the policy on
water and sanitation;
• technical and financial partners can see the impact of their investment in the
water sector and sanitation and also to better target areas in which to invest;
• private investors to identify business opportunities;
• the end user to know the situation of his community compared with the
other communities.
Instilling the culture of systematic reuse of data still needs further
Corruption Perceptions Index
data in francophone countries
in Africa from 2014

encouragement for it to be firmly embedded in Burkina Faso, especially for
groups including developers, journalists, researchers, planners and economists.
This continues to be a major part of BODI’s work.
3. Ecosystem development
Since BODI launched, there has been a shift from the concept of how open
data can help Burkina Faso, to real changes in societal behavior.
•The interest of open data appears increasingly in the speeches of politicians.
The current Prime Minister, Paul KabaThieba, said in his State of the Nation
Address that, the Government has continued the implementation of project
Burkina Open Data Initiative allowing, through the Open Election platform, to
have the results of the elections of 29 November 2015 in real time.”
•The creation of many associations working for government are strengthening
the transparency efforts of the BODI.These include, among others, the Open
Burkina association working in the field of transparency in the ‘extractive
industries’ and the association ‘Open Education’ fighting for the accessibility
of education data.
•The growing interest of development partners for open data initiatives.
Indeed, many associations receive support from development partners for
the implementation of their transparency projects
4. The future for open data in Burkina Faso
Despite the challenges facing Burkina Faso, the BODI is now established as one
of the developments that the country embraces in its move towards becoming
a transparent and open society. From a timid beginning in 2013, stakeholders
of open data in Burkina Faso have made the concept a reality and the interests
are now apparent in all spheres of society.
However, it remains that some nationally important projects will strengthen
the open data initiative.These include:
• Burkina Faso's membership of organizations such as the Open Government
Partnership (OGP) and the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition
(GODAN).
•The adoption of a law requiring all data collected which has received public
funds to be made openly available.
•The creation of an open data project incubator to promote effective reuse of
data in order to create economic wealth for Burkina Faso.
Burkina Faso’s commitment to open data is commendable and BODI is
laying the groundwork towards transparency and accountability nationwide.
Data driven initiatives aim to improve the quality of information available to
its people, and in turn is increasing the availability of knowledge which will
subsequently contribute to economic growth and international recognition.

The State of Australian
Research Data – Systems
are Ready but Where are
the Incentives?
David Groenewegen, Director, Research at Monash University,
Victoria, Australia
Over the past ten years we have seen tremendous advances in the provision
of infrastructure, both technical and human, to enable and encourage better
storage, management and collaboration around research data.
Australian government infrastructure projects such as the Australian
National Data Service, have resulted in most local universities and research
organizations having not only a data management policy, but also an active data
management infrastructure.This has resulted in thousands more datasets being
made available, with an even larger number being effectively managed (Figure
20).This represents a substantial improvement on the situation ten years ago,
and it continues to grow and develop.Well managed data enables better and
more efficient research.
Additionally, the Australian Federal government has made a strong public
commitment to opening up its data and is pushing data driven innovation in
its Public Data Policy Statement1
.The statement, which is supported by similar
policies in many state governments, promotes the idea that ‘open data has the
potential to stimulate innovation and help grow the economy, improve service
delivery and decision making for planning and policy development’.The belief
here is that harnessing the value of public data will increase Australia’s capacity
to remain competitive in the global digital economy.
The Australian government has also acknowledged the need for better
systems to discover and disseminate data, stating:“All new systems must
support discoverability, interoperability, accessibility and cost-effective access
to data”.This applies to data produced by Australian government entities,
but falls short of mandating similar principles to research data produced at
Australian universities. Even though there are a growing number of mandates
from funders and institutions requiring and encouraging data to be made
open and institutions have policies and infrastructure in place it seems like not
enough researchers are embracing open data.
Resistance to making data available remains high. My team at Monash
University Library have contacted hundreds of research staff about making just
the data related to their recent journal articles available, and we’re lucky if one
in 20 even want to consider it, let alone actually do it.
This is completely understandable.While there are many important reasons
why data could not or should not be shared, there are also not enough
The Australian Federal
government has made a
strong public commitment
to opening up its data
and is pushing data driven
innovation in its Public Data
Policy Statement.

incentives to make it worthwhile. Open data sharing can be an added burden,
especially given how busy most researchers are, and how many things they
have to do to gain credit - or risk being penalized. Sharing data is one more
piece of work, one more system to learn and possibly, a risk to their careers if
something goes wrong.
So for those of us who believe in the value of open data, what do we need to
do to encourage researchers to do that little bit more?
1. We need to make it easier. Here at Monash University we try
to make it easy for all our researchers by providing a university wide
data management platform. It still needs to be more connected to other
systems that researchers use, so they can get the maximum return for the
least effort, but it is a good start.
2. We need better incentives - preferably credit for making data open
that contributes to career advancement and/or financial reward. Because
people deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.
3. We need more evidence of the benefits for individual
researchers. Researchers like evidence, that’s what they look for.There
isn’t enough to show that the effort needed to make their data open and
discoverable benefits them.As in all walks of life, saying this is the “right
thing to do” will only achieve a certain amount.
4. We need to be prepared to acknowledge the potential
downsides, and put in place processes to help mitigate them. For
instance, the process of de-identification of data is difficult and important,
so how can this be made easier and shown to be safe?
We have the policy and the infrastructures to make this happen, and
increasingly this has led to better managed data, data that can be stored for the
future and shared in a way that researchers can manage. But if we really want it
to be made more open, the incentives need to change.
1 Australian Government Public Data Policy Statement https://blog.data.gov.au/news-media/blog/australian-government-public-data-policy-statement
Figure 20 - From Figshare's Open Data
Survey: Frequency with which Australian
respondents have made data freely
available versus whether they have reused
data made openly available by others,
n=1787

Can Japan Catch Up?
Fostering Culture, People,
and Community for
Research Data
Dr Kazuhiro Hayashi, Senior Research Fellow, Science and
Technology Foresight Center, National Institute of Science
and Technology Policy, Japan Nobuko Miyairi, Regional
Director, Asia Pacific, ORCID Inc, Tokyo, Japan
Open science is a strong undercurrent of science policy discussion in many
countries. Japan is no exception. In early 2015, the Council for Science,
Technology and Innovation (CSTI) issued a report that illustrated guiding
principles on promoting open science in Japan1
based on expert panel
discussions.With the global movements of open science and an array of
initiatives as a backdrop, the CSTI urged Japan’s research community not to
lag behind, but to build a solid and sustainable framework to keep abreast
of global open science trends.The report devoted a considerable amount of
space to open research data; defining the scope and responsibilities of each
sector. Publicly funded institutions must disseminate their research results and
data data (Figure 21).The 5th Science andTechnology Basic plan2
started from
2016 and it clearly declared the promotion of Open Science based on the
CSTI’s report. And also, Japan raised an agenda of Open Science at G7 Science
andTechnology Ministers’ Meeting held inTsukuba, Japan, releasing theTsukuba
Communique3
which described further commitments by organizing a working
party to implement Open Science Policy.
At a grass-roots level, there have been researchers, research managers,
librarians and information professionals who have engaged in and are
contributing to the global open research data initiatives. However, the CSTI
report has accelerated ongoing efforts and invited more people to participate
in this initiative.The 7th Plenary of Research Data Alliance (RDA) was held in
Tokyo in early March and attended by more than 100 Japanese participants,
accounting for 30% of total attendees.A month later, a debrief session was
organized at the National Diet Library, where key participants of the RDA
plenary shared their views on what it takes to be involved in community
initiatives like RDA.
Not only are the philosophy and goals of open science being advocated;
Japan has been steadily making strides towards building the infrastructure for
research data.The1
[NM2] Japan Link Center (JaLC), a Japanese DOI agency,
facilitated an experimental project of DOI registration for research data in
2014. 14 research institutions and universities participated, the project goal
was to establish reliable workflows to assign DOIs to research data. During
the course of this project, a number of issues and challenges were identified
– the timing of DOI assignment, granularity of research data, the need for
Not only are the philosophy
and goals of open science
being advocated; Japan
has been steadily making
strides towards building
the infrastructure for
research data.

sustainable and consistent organizational policy, the lifecycle of research data,
handling of dynamic data, versioning, and more – all incorporated into JaLC’s
guidelines for registering DOIs for research data4
.
With a large number of institutional repositories5
, training appropriate staff
for managing research data is imperative. Because of this, Japan has a growing
number of librarians who are able custodians of the institutions’ data. JaLC’s
experimental project brought together a network of individuals from across
multiple disciplines to facilitate this discussion.The Research Data Utilization
Forum was initiated in June 2016, allowing these individuals to continue
networking and to participate in ongoing discussions. Ultimately, this forum will
serve as a vehicle for fostering the culture in research data management, thus
harmonizing with the global landscape of open research data as recommended
by the CSTI.
Without these recommendations being fully embedded, it continues to be an
uphill struggle to motivate researchers to fully embrace open data.
1 Cabinet office, Government of Japan. Pro-
moting Open Science in Japan: Opening up
a new era for the advancement of science.
March 30, 2015.http://www8.cao.go.jp/
cstp/sonota/openscience/150330_open-
science_en1.pdf
2The 5th Science andTechnology Ba-
sic Plan: http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/
kihonkeikaku/5basicplan_en.pdf
3TheTsukuba Communique, G7 Science
andTechnology Ministers’ Meeting: http://
www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/others/commu-
nique_en.html
4 Japan Link Center. Guidelines for Registering
DOIs for Research Data. October 20, 2015.
https:doi.org/10.11502/rd_guideline_en
5 496 institutional repositories are listed as of
August 31, 2016 by the National Institute of
Informatics at: http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en/list/
Figure 21 - From Figshare's Open
Data Survey: Frequency with which
Asian respondents have made data
freely available versus all other
respondents, n=1430

The Bird in Hand:
Humanities Research in
the Age of Open Data
Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Professor of English, University of
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Traditionally, humanities scholars have resisted describing their raw material as
“data” 10
.
Instead, they speak of “sources” and “readings.” “Primary sources” are the
texts, objects, and artifacts they study;“secondary sources” are the works
of other commentators used in their analyses;“readings” can be either the
arguments that represent the end product of their research or the extracts
and quotations they use for support.
These definitions are contextual.The primary source for one argument can be
the secondary source for another or,as in the case of a“critical edition” of a
historical text,simultaneously primary and secondary.Almost any document,
artifact or record of human activity can be a topic of study.Arguments proposing
previously unrecognized sources (“high school yearbooks,cookbooks,or wear
patterns in the floors of public places”) are valued acts of scholarship.1
This resistance to“data” is a recognition of real differences in the way humanists
collect and use such material.In other domains,data are generated through
experiment,observation,and measurement.Darwin goes to the Galapagos
Islands,observes the finches,and fills notebooks with what he sees.His notes
(i.e.his“data”)“represent information in a formalized manner suitable for
communication,interpretation,or processing”2
.They are“the facts,numbers,
letters,and symbols that describe an object,idea,condition,situation,or other
factors”3
.Given the extent to which they are generated,it has been argued that
they might be described better as capta,“taken,” than data,“given”.4
The material of humanities research traditionally is much more datum than
captum, finch than note. Since the humanities involve the study of the meaning
of human thought, culture, and history, such material typically involves other
people’s work. It is often unique and its interpretation is usually provisional,
depending on broader understandings of purpose, context and form that are
themselves open to analysis, argument and modification. In the humanities, we
more often end up debating why we think something is a finch than what we
can conclude from observing it.
Perhaps most telling is the fact that humanities sources, unlike scientific
data, are usually practically as well as theoretically non-rivalrous5.
Humanities
researchers rarely have an incentive (or capability) to prevent others from
accessing their raw material and entire research domains (e.g. Jane Austen
studies) can work for centuries from the same few primary sources. Priority
disputes that occur regularly in the sciences6
are almost non-existent within
the humanities.1
Humanities researchers
rarely have an incentive
(or capability) to prevent
others from accessing their
raw material and entire
research domains.

The digital age is changing one aspect of this traditional disciplinary difference.
Mass digitalization and new tools make it possible to extract material
algorithmically from large numbers of cultural artifacts.Where researchers
used to be limited to sources in archives and libraries to which they had
physical access, digital archives and metadata now make it easier to work
across complete historical or geographic corpora: all surviving periodicals from
19th century England, for example, or every known pamphlet from the Civil
War. In the digital age, humanities resources can be capta as well as data.
Such changes allow for new types of research and improve the efficacy of some
traditional approaches.But they also raise existential questions about long-
standing practices.Traditionally,humanities researchers have tended to work
with details from a limited corpus to make larger arguments:“close readings” of
selected passages in a given text to produce larger interpretations of the work
as a whole;or of passages from a few selected works to support arguments
about larger events,movements or schools.In one famous but far from atypical
example,author IanWatt uses readings from five novels and three authors as the
main primary sources in his discussion of the Rise of the Novel.7
In the age of open data, it is tempting to see this as being, in essence, a small-
sample analysis lacking in statistical power.8
But such data-centric criticism of
traditional humanities arguments can be a form of category error. Humanities
research is as a rule more about interpretation than solution. It is about why
you understand something the way you do rather than why something is
the way it is. It treats its sources as examples to support an argument rather
phenomena to be observed in the service of a solution.WhileWatt’s title,
“The Rise of the Novel,” can be understood as implying a historical scope
that his sample cannot support, his subtitle,“Studies in Defoe, Richardson,
and Fielding,” shows that he actually was making an argument about the
interpretation of three canonical authors based on his understanding of
the novel’s early history - an understanding that by definition always will be
provisional and open to amendment.
The real challenge for the humanities in the age of digital open data is
recognizing the value of both types of sources: the material we can now
generate algorithmically at previously unimaginable scales and the continuing
value of the exemplary source or passage.As the raw material of humanities
research begins to acquire formal qualities associated with data in other fields,
the danger is going to be that we forget that our research requires us to be
sensitive to both object and observation, datum and captum, finch and note. In
asking ourselves what we can do with a million books9
, we need to remember
that we remain interested in the meaning of individual titles and passages.
1 Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
2 Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. 2012.“Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).” CCSDS 650.0-M-2.
NASA. http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf.
3 National Research Council. 1999. Question of Balance: Private Rights and the Public Interest in Scientific andTechnical Databases.Washington:
National Academies Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3375284.
4 Jensen, H. E. 1950.“Editorial Note.” InThroughValues to Social Interpretation: Essays on Social Contexts,Actions,Types, and Prospects, vii – xi.
Sociological Series. Duke University Press.
5 Kitchin, Rob. 2014.The Data Revolution.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.
6 Casadevall,Arturo, and Ferric C. Fang. 2012.“WinnerTakes All.” Scientific American 307 (2): 13. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0812-13.
7Watt, Ian P. (1957) 1987.The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Hogarth.
8 Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis : Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
9 Crane, Gregory. 2006.“What DoYou Do with a Million Books?” D-Lib Magazine 12 (3). doi:10.1045/march2006-crane.
10 Marche, Stephen. 2012.“Literature Is Not Data:Against Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, October. https://lareviewofbooks.org/
article/literature-is-not-data-against-digital-humanities/.

Appendix
Figure A - Demographics of respondents
Figure B - Are you aware of freely available research data?

Figure C - Have you previously prepared a Data Management Plan?
Figure D - How large is the total data associated with your typical research project?
Figure E - How many different file types do you deal with?

Figure F - How important is file versioning in your research process?
Figure G - How many files do you produce during a typical research project?

Figure H -Who would meet the costs of making your research data openly available?
Figure I - Do you annotate your data?
Figure J -What tools do you use to share data? ( n=1561,Email n=980,Google n=505,Dropbox n=795,Figshare n=235,Github n=235,Other n=227)

Figure K - Does your research involve collaboration with any of the following groups? (n=1688)

Figure L -Which of the following methodologies do you use to gather data? n=1676

Figure M -Which of the type of data do you produce? n=1667

Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and Principal of Jesus College. He
is also the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI). In 2009, Sir Nigel was appointed Information
Adviser to the UK Government, helping transform public access to Government information, including the widely
acclaimed data.gov.uk site. In 2006 he was one of three founding Directors of Garlik Ltd, which was awardedTechnology
Pioneer status by the DavosWorld Economic Forum and won the prestigious UK national BT Flagship Award. In 2013
he was awarded a Knighthood for services to science and engineering. He is a member of the GDS (Government Digital
Services) Advisory Board. In 2015 the Chancellor asked him to Co-Chair the UK French DataTaskforce.
Malick Tapsoba is an Open Data Specialist. He culminates seven years of leadership experience at ANPTIC
(www.anptic.gov.bf) where he works currently as Deputy Manager of the Burkina Open Data Initiative (BODI) since
2013. He successfully engaged Government bodies and Civil Society Organizations in BODI. Under his leadership,
BODI achieved the “Open Election” project which strongly contributed to the November 2015 peaceful presidential
election in Burkina Faso after 27 years of dictatorship. Malick is also the project manager of ISOC-BF and a member
of NextGen@ICANN. He holds a masters degree in international e-services.
Daniel O’Donnell is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge. His main research interests include Digital
Humanities,Scholarly Communication,Old English language and literature,the history of the book,editorial and textual
scholarship,and reception-oriented criticism.
David Groenewegen is the Director, Research at Monash University,Australia. David is responsible for Library
client services to the science, technology, engineering and medicine disciplines at the University, as well as the
contribution the Library makes to the University's research activity.This includes oversight and development of the
institutional repository and Monash University Publishing. He is also the University's research data management
strategy lead. David spent four years as a Director of the Australian National Data Service, where he was involved
with the development and implementation of data management solutions across the Australian university sector.
Natalie Meyers is a Partnerships and Collaborations manager at the Center for Open Science (cos.io) during a
part-time leave from her faculty role as an E-Research librarian at the University of Notre Dame's Digital Initiatives and
Scholarship unit in the Hesburgh Libraries. Natalie devotes a significant part of her time as an embedded data librarian
and served as theVector-Borne Disease Network digital librarian for the past three years. She is a member of senior
personnel for the NSF funded Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (daspos.org) project.
Dr Sabina Leonelli is an Associate Professor in the College of Social Science and International Studies at Exeter
University. Sabina is the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), where she
leads the Data Studies research strand. Her research spans the fields of history and philosophy of biology, science and
technology studies and general philosophy of science. Her current focus is on the philosophy, history and sociology
of data-intensive science, especially the research processes, scientific outputs and social embedding of Open Science,
Open Data and Big Data.
Nobuko Miyairi is Regional Director,Asia Pacific for ORCID (http://orcid.org), based in Tokyo, Japan. Nobuko
builds relationships with stakeholders across Asia Pacific to expand ORCID adoption and awareness in the research
community. Prior to joining ORCID, Nobuko held positions at Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group, where
she worked closely with research organizations, government policy makers and funding bodies to provide research
management solutions.A librarian by training, Nobuko earned an MLIS from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Contributor Biographies:

Dr Kazuhiro Hayashi is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, Japan.
Kazuhiro has been involved in scholarly publishing and communication, in a wide variety of roles, for more than 20
years.At the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), he worked successively as Editor, Production Manager, E-journal Manager,
and Promotions Manager.Throughout his broad range of roles in publishing he has focused on scholarly communication
through E-journals, and he has used his IT skills to reconstruct and improve the way publishing is managed. In 2012 he
moved from CSJ to the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), where he is engaged in a study
to provide evidence to develop a Science and Technology policy for administrators and policy makers, now focusing on
the future of Scholarly Communication including Open Science and alternative impact assessments.
Dr Mark Hahnel is founder and CEO of Figshare, London. He is passionate about open science and the potential it
has to revolutionise the research community. Figshare is looking to become the place where all academics make their
research openly available, as well as producing a secure cloud based storage space for their outputs. By encouraging
users to manage their research in a more organized manner, so that it can be easily made open to comply with funder
mandates. Openly available research outputs will mean that academia can truly reproduce and build on top of the
research of others.
Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of SPARC, (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a
coalition of academic and research libraries expanding the open communication of scholarship. SPARC supports new
models for sharing digital articles, data and educational resources, and is widely recognized as the leading force for
Open Access advocacy. Heather is an active participant on committees and projects at several U.S. federal agencies. In
2015, she was appointed to the newly formed Commerce Data Advisory Council and tasked with providing input to
the Secretary of Commerce on issues surrounding open data.
Dr Till Bruckner is the AllTrials campaign manager and Beth Ellis is a PhD student currently doing an internship
at Sense about Science, the charity that runs the AllTrials campaign. Readers interested in the campaign can visit the
AllTrials website. For a highly readable in-depth discussion of missing trials and evidence distortion in medicine, we
recommend the book “Bad Pharma” by AllTrials co-founder Dr Ben Goldacre.
Dr Daniel Hook has been Managing Director of Digital Science since July 2015. He has been involved in research
information management, open access, open data and software development for more than a decade, holding positions
as Director of Research Metrics at Digital Science, Founder and CEO of Symplectic and COO of Figshare. By training
he is a mathematical physicist specialising in quantum theory. Daniel holds visiting positions at Imperial College London
and Washington University in St Louis and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.
Jon Treadway is Director, Operational Strategy, Digital Science, London, UK
Dr Briony Fane is Metrics Researcher, Digital Science, London, UK
Dan Penny is Head of Market Intelligence: Researchers and Audience, Springer Nature, London, UK
Anna Gallagher is Research Analyst, Strategy Market Intelligence, Springer Nature, London, UK
Laura Wheeler is Community Manager at Digital Science, Lisa Hulme is Consulting Director of Communications
at Digital Science, Julia Giddings is Global Marketing Manager at Digital Science and Alan Hyndman is Marketing
Manager at Figshare.

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