Feature g
of interdisciplinary research, and show researchers that there is a different way of approaching research and learning from other studies. I don’t know if the pandemic will have a massive impact on data-sharing and open data. It may raise awareness,’ she adds. ‘But from a user-perspective, it could bring a culture of wanting to pay it forward, putting data in a repository, so that should we be held to ransom by a pandemic again, research can still be undertaken remotely.’ Across the Atlantic, an analogous story
is unfolding. Daniella Lowenberg is based at the University of California and is product manager for Dryad, the open and curated data publishing platform for scientific and medical disciplines. A passionate advocate of open research data, Lowenberg is also director of Make Data Count, an initiative focused on building the infrastructure for research data metrics. From its inception, Dryad has set
out to connect publishers, institutions, data repositories and researchers, in a bid to drive the adoption of proper data management practices that institutions and funders are keen to see. And, over the pandemic, Lowenberg has seen a clear rise in dataset deposits. ‘We’ve certainly seen increased amounts of data coming in from all disciplines; ecology, evolution, biomedical sciences and specifically from Covid-19 research,’ she says. ‘We saw a big bump from March onwards, which we think was because researchers had more time to spend with their data, as opposed to producing new data in the lab.’ Lowenberg is also certain that her Dryad
observations mimic other repositories worldwide. As she highlights, myriad researchers were gene sequencing Sars- CoV-2 from the outset, and publishing results in NextStrain, an open source project to publicise and analyse pathogen
genome data, and the National Institutes of Health-supported data repositories, which fuelled further analyses on how the virus had evolved. ‘We definitely saw an influx of Covid-19
datasets,’ she adds. ‘But quantity has had to be balanced with quality, and we received new datasets that just couldn’t be published, as they posed ethical risks.’ Like Merrett, Lowenberg is not yet sure
how much of an impact the pandemic will have on data sharing and open data, but she is certain it will bring some change. Pointing to past pandemics and crises, such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak and climate change, she highlights how these events also triggered intense rises in data-sharing across relevant disciplines, and importantly, raised community standards. ‘Much like geneticists, ecology and
environmental scientists early on understood the importance of sharing data, and it became a standard in those research domains to share data,’ she says. ‘So now, in the last decade, we continue to see the importance of sharing biomedical data, and hopefully that trend will stick.’ For the Dryad product manager, this
doesn’t come a moment too soon. In June The Lancet article, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of Covid-19: a multinational registry analysis”, was retracted after questions were raised over the paper’s data. While the published research initially
brought global trials of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 to a grinding halt, amid fears of increased deaths, anomalies in its data soon emerged. Concerns were not helped by participating company, Surgisphere, refusing to transfer a full dataset to peer reviewers, citing confidentiality violations. The lead author quickly requested the research be retracted. With the controversy over, trials on the
“We continue to see the
biomedical data, and hopefully that trend will stick”
importance of sharing
anti-malarial drug have since restarted and The Lancet is now demanding more detailed data-sharing statements, while altering peer review processes for future papers based on large datasets. However, as Lowenberg also points out, the entire drug-testing debacle could have been avoided if the necessary datasets were made available from day one. ‘If the data had been available, the research could have been called out immediately,’ she says. ‘Data are the building blocks of science, without which [research] cannot be trusted.’ Mainstay repositories are not alone in witnessing the impact of the pandemic on data sharing-related activities. According to Yann Mahé, managing director of MyScienceWork, his business saw a sharp increase in demand for demonstrations of Polaris OS, an open source platform for archiving and analysing data. ‘It’s been quite intense for us as we are
quite a small organisation, but from March to June we had a surge in demand for system demonstrations,’ he says. ‘I believe this is because a lot of researchers are
Left: Grace Baynes
Right: Yann Mahé
g 6 Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021
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