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research at PLOS, is also excited about STM 2020 Research Data Year, and like van Rossum, hopes to see new publishers taking part. He says: ‘This is so important as small- and medium-sized publishers are now engaging on the topic of data and will be introducing data policies... we have moved from a smaller number of big publishers adopting open data to having an industry-wide focus and measuring this progress is really important.’ To this end, the 2020 STM Research
Data Year website already plans to have a dashboard to show progress on the numbers of links to datasets from articles, journals with good data policies, and articles with data availability statements. Importantly, the programme also offers frameworks for journal policies and data availability that publishers can select according to its journal and community. ‘We even have a Codex framework that publishers can use to link and cite to datasets,’ says van Rossum. ‘We really want to point publishers to the right resources and allow them to learn from other publishers on how to implement open data as effectively as possible.’
Mandates matter Alan Hyndman is marketing director at online open access repository, Figshare, and like van Rossum and Hrynaszkiewicz, he has noted a rapid take-up of data- sharing across the board. ‘When Figshare started in 2011, [data-sharing] was quite obscure and only really carried out by people into the open research movement,’ he says. ‘But since then we’ve seen major funders, publishers and institutions, worldwide, introduce data policies.’ ‘We’ve seen grass-roots, bottom-up adoption and peer-to-peer sharing but also a lot of top-down pressure, such as funding mandates,’ he adds. Indeed, Hyndman is certain that the
growing use of mandates is having a big impact on data-sharing. While the likes of The Wellcome Trust and EPSRC have led the mandate pack, the scholarly community is now seeing developments from the National Institutes of Health, US, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. ‘The European Commission has also been putting out a lot of guidance here and South Africa [the National Research Foundation] has mandated all of its data to be openly available – this really is a growing trend,’ says Hyndman. Similarly, Hrynaszkiewicz, is a firm
believer that data policies and mandates are crucial to the adoption of open data. From word-go, PLOS has implemented a solid data policy, which the PLOS Publisher believes has raised the awareness of data-
6 Research Information April/May 2020
“Citations are emerging as a powerful incentive to share data”
sharing as well as signalled its importance. Hrynaszkiewicz also highlights PLOS
research that reveals that only around five per cent of researchers provided a statement of data availability with such an ‘encouragement’ policy. In contrast, this figure increased to some 90 per cent when a mandate is brought in. ‘A data sharing policy is more likely to lead to the sharing of data if it is mandatory rather than just a statement of encouragement to share data,’ he says. Kirsty Merrett, research support
librarian for research data management, at the University of Bristol Library Services, UK, is also convinced that mandates work when it comes to data-sharing. Bristol is home to the
data.bris repository, and as such, Merrett advises researchers on data management planning, data storage and data sharing. ‘We can talk about the societal benefits of sharing data, the fact that it’s publicly funded, and it’s good for your research and you might get more collaborators,’ she says. ‘But when funders say share your data as we’ve paid for it, and publishers say we want the data that supports this – these are the real drivers.’ ‘[Sharing data] is no longer philanthropy, it’s now a case of you might not get any
money and you might not get published if you don’t,’ she adds. ‘So it’s this publish or perish notion... and if a researcher hasn’t got his or her data ready for this, then they’ve lost those REF points.’ Mandates aside, citations – considered
by many researchers as the Holy Grail in terms of reward – are emerging as a powerful incentive to share data. In a recent study, ‘The citation advantage of linking publications to research data’, published in open-access repository, arXiv, Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues classified the data availability statements on more than half a million PLOS and BioMed Central journals. Analyses revealed that researchers who stored their data in a repository were associated with, on average, a 25 per cent increase in citations to their research papers. ‘Several studies over the last decade
have also found an association between sharing data publicly and more citations to the papers that report that data,’ he says. ‘We weren’t able to say that sharing was the cause of the citation rise, but there was certainly that association.’ Van Rossum is heartened by the latest studies linking data-sharing with a rise in citations and reckons the results outline the clear advantages of sharing data. ‘A key anxiety for any research is “does this help my career?”,’ he says. ‘We see that the more data is shared, the better cited your article becomes... [and also] citations to a dataset count just as much as citations to literature.’ In a similar vein, Figshare tracks citations to all of its content, from articles
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