Empty archives: why do scientists have such a hard time with (data) sharing?

Commentary by Alessandro Delfanti:

The September 10th issue of Nature contains a special part focused on data sharing in research which is freely accessible online.

In the editorial of the special issue, Nature claims for a comprehensive approach: scientific institutions should invest more money in education and in hardware and software, in order to “create the digital equivalent of libraries” to preserve and share scientific data.

In Data sharing: empty archives , Bryn Nelson investigates some of the motivations of the failure of several data sharing projects.

The interesting examples come from many scientific fields, from biology to physics to neuroscience, and people interviewed comprehend scientists, open science activists and policy makers. As an article on the Science Commons blog underlines, Nature “explicitly recommends open sharing and the use of CC0 to put data in the public domain”.

Excerpt from the editorial:

“More and more often these days, a research project’s success is measured not just by the publications it produces, but also by the data it makes available to the wider community. Pioneering archives such as GenBank have demonstrated just how powerful such legacy data sets can be for generating new discoveries — especially when data are combined from many laboratories and analysed in ways that the original researchers could not have anticipated.

All but a handful of disciplines still lack the technical, institutional and cultural frameworks required to support such open data access — leading to a scandalous shortfall in the sharing of data by researchers. This deficiency urgently needs to be addressed by funders, universities and the researchers themselves.

Research funding agencies need to recognize that preservation of and access to digital data are central to their mission, and need to be supported accordingly.

Agencies and the research community together need to create the digital equivalent of libraries: institutions that can take responsibility for preserving digital data and making them accessible over the long term.”

From the article Data sharing: empty archives:

“In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores — just about any kind of digital data the university’s investigators could produce. Six months of research and marketing had convinced the university that a publicly accessible online archive would be well received. At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space. Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

As Gibbons and anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster observed in their 2005 postmortem, “The phrase ‘if you build it, they will come’ does not yet apply to IRs [institutional repositories].” A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts. Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets. But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers’ concerns.

The creation of the legal and technical infrastructure to accommodate researchers’ data-sharing concerns is a huge task, and should not be left solely to non-profit organizations and individual universities. Nor should it be left to the funding agencies’ grant-by-grant allocations for data sharing. It will require major government investments, starting with demonstration projects to explore how sharing can best be done. “What we need is a working example that you can point to,” he says.

Larger efforts will be required to tackle what Michener sees as the overriding challenge:

“Changing the culture of science from one where publications were viewed as the primary product of the scientific enterprise to one that also equally values data.”

Without that cultural shift, says Gibbons, many digital archives are likely to remain little more than stacks of empty shelves.”

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