Calling Researchers! How Willing are You to Make Your Own Research Data Open for Reuse?

Last week, we made a bold call to our Twitter followers where we asked:

“How willing are you to make your own research data open for reuse?”

During 2016’s Open Access Week, our portfolio company Figshare released a report which gathered insights and narratives from leading professionals in the open data space from around the globe. The report titled, “The State of Open Data” included a foreword from Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), UK.

The report was supported by Digital Science and the survey was conducted in partnership with Springer Nature. It’s aim was to highlight the extent of awareness around open data, the incentives around its use, and perspectives researchers have about making their own research data open.

For the majority of the surveyed respondents, open data is already a reality, and approximately three quarters of respondents have made their research data openly available at some point. A similar number are also aware of data sets that are open to access, reuse, repurpose and redistribute

Our recent Twitter poll assuredly supports these positive findings:

Calling researchers! How willing are you to make your own research data open for reuse? (See @figshare‘s report https://t.co/LMc6jha94T)

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) January 16, 2017

It is certainly comforting to see that 0% of our poll respondents would not consider sharing their data, and that 56% have already done so. Of course our Twitter following may well be biased, but this is certainly a positive step for the future of making research data open for reuse.