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　　Data-sharing: Everything on display

　　· Richard Van Noorden

　　Published onlin 07 August 2013

　　This article was originally published in the journal Nature

　　Lizzie Wolkovich always felt she ought to make her research data freely available online. “The idea that data should be public has been in the background through my entire career,” she says.

　　Yet in 2003–09, while she was working on her ecology PhD, there were few incentives for her to share. Sharing would not help her to get grants or publications, and although posting data online was not unheard of, few researchers actually did it, she says. Many preferred to hang on to their hard-won field data, sharing privately if they did so at all.

　　But after she earned her doctorate, Wolkovich overcame her hesitation, thanks to a combination of helpful colleagues, improved resources and a discernible shift in the research community's attitude. So in 2010, through an online data repository called the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, Wolkovich released her doctoral data set — the fruit of thousands of hours spent measuring the diversity of arthropods in 56 experimental soil plots she had set up in the arid scrubscape of southern California. Since then, she has publicized all the data that she has collected, including a meta-analysis of 50 other studies that she examined to see how factors such as rising temperatures affect the life cycles of plants. Wolkovich, now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, says that she herself had never objected to sharing her results — she had just not known how to do so. She likes the fact that her data are now easily accessible to other researchers and anyone else who is interested. “It saves me so much time,” she says.

　　Wolkovich is one of a number of early-career researchers who are enthusiastically posting their work online. They are publishing what one online-repository founder calls small data — experimental results, data sets, papers, posters and other material from individual research groups — as opposed to the 'big data' spawned by large consortia, which usually employ specialists to plan their data storage and release. The many resources now available give researchers options for where and how to post their data, releasing potentially fruitful data sets that used to be locked up in unpublished paper files, buried in journal-article appendices or hidden away on scientists' hard drives.

　　Opening up

　　Open data-sharers are still in the minority in many fields. Although many researchers broadly agree that public access to raw data would accelerate science — because other scientists might be able to make advances not foreseen by the data's producers — most are reluctant to post the results of their own labours online (see Nature 461, 160–163; 2009). When Wolkovich, for instance, went hunting for the data from the 50 studies in her meta-analysis, only 8 data sets were available online, and many of the researchers whom she e-mailed refused to share their work. Forced to extract data from tables or figures in publications, Wolkovich's team could conduct only limited analyses.

　　Some communities have agreed to share online — geneticists, for example, post DNA sequences at the GenBank repository, and astronomers are accustomed to accessing images of galaxies and stars from, say, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a telescope that has observed some 500 million objects — but these remain the exception, not the rule. Historically, scientists have objected to sharing for many reasons: it is a lot of work; until recently, good databases did not exist; grant funders were not pushing for sharing; it has been difficult to agree on standards for formatting data and the contextual information called metadata; and there is no agreed way to assign credit for data.