search.noResults

search.searching

note.createNoteMessage

search.noResults

search.searching

orderForm.title

orderForm.productCode
orderForm.description
orderForm.quantity
orderForm.itemPrice
orderForm.price
orderForm.totalPrice
orderForm.deliveryDetails.billingAddress
orderForm.deliveryDetails.deliveryAddress
orderForm.noItems
Feature


g


statement, as I don’t want to look like I’m hiding something”.’ Certainly, researchers’ propensity for sharing data is reflected in Figshare’s latest survey. Working with parent company Digital Science, the organisation recently released the results of a global survey of 2,000 researchers on data sharing, alongside a report, The State of Open Data. Analysis revealed that a hefty three


quarters of respondents had already made their research data openly available at some point. At the same time, a similar number were aware of data-sets that are open to access, reuse, repurpose and redistribute. Like Hrynaszkiewicz and Taroni, Daniel


Hook, chief executive of Digital Science, is confident that data sharing is gathering momentum. As he puts it: ‘Our report is very heartening, as such large numbers of people are engaging and actively sharing at least some of their data.’ According to the survey, awareness of open data transcends age and career progression. But one of the report’s more eye-opening results indicates that nearly 70 per cent of researchers value data citation as much as an article citation, with a further 10 per cent actually valuing the


“It’s clear data sharing at the company [Springer Nature] is a long- term project”


data citation more. For Hook, the fact that researchers are now accepting citations between data, datasets, and databases is a ‘big deal’, with huge ramifications for scholarly publishing. ‘We spend millions and millions of


dollars globally on research, and [a part of] this is just reproducing someone else’s negative results that they hadn’t shared because they had nowhere to publish it,’ he says. ‘The idea that we don’t have to completely reproduce every negative


10 Research Information December 2016/January 2017


result that other researchers have thrown away offers massive potential for research to be more efficient.’ What’s more, he is also certain that


the rise of data sharing also provides researchers with a chance to be seen as ‘trail-blazers’ in the up and coming field of open data. ‘The next step should be for a university


to award a professorship to a researcher that’s produced brilliant work with data,’ he says. ‘In the next couple of years, someone will receive a professorship, not because they had an idea, wrote a paper or performed an experiment, but because he or she collected and shared a large amount of data in a way that had an impact on research.’ ‘It really is only a matter of time before


having a highly-cited dataset is as important in some fields as a paper in Nature, Science or Cell,’ he adds. Professor Brian Nosek from the


University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science is a driving force behind data sharing and open science. He agrees with Hook and believes it’s high time researchers received recognition for their data. ‘There is this ongoing frustration for


researchers that they only get credit for their final paper,’ he says. ‘But really their


great work may have been in the data they generated, the methodology used, or the code that was written to use that data.’ ‘Changes we are seeing right now are


going to move the credit system towards how researchers formulate science, which is where the real scholarship can be,’ he adds.


Reproducibility crisis While Nosek is passionate about data sharing, he also believes science faces a key challenge right now. Scientific success for any grant-seeking researcher depends on being published rather than – as he puts it – ‘being right’. ‘Given this incentive structure and publication being the currency of science, I am confronted with choices,’ he says. ‘Do I make my research more publishable and less accurate, or do I make it less publishable but more accurate? Now that is a conflict of interests.’ Realising this problem required ‘broad


intervention’, he set up the Center for Open Science in January 2013 with colleague Jeffrey Spies. The Center first looked at issues around every researcher’s bugbear – reproducibility. In August 2015, a team of 270


researchers, led by Nosek, unveiled the results of a study to replicate the findings


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


Springer Nature


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32