Why it takes a village to manage and share data

TL;DR

Effective data sharing in scientific research requires a collaborative infrastructure involving multiple stakeholders, addressing diverse incentives, concerns, and international considerations to build a sustainable global ecosystem.

Contribution

This paper highlights the complex stakeholder landscape and infrastructural needs essential for implementing effective, sustainable data sharing practices in scientific research.

Findings

Stakeholder concerns are interdependent across seven dimensions.

Data sharing involves infrastructure, institutions, and economics.

International collaboration is crucial for sustainability.

Abstract

Implementation plans for the National Institutes of Health policy for data management and sharing, which takes effect in 2023, provide an opportunity to reflect on the stakeholders, infrastructures, practice, economics, and sustainability of data sharing. Responsibility for fulfilling data sharing requirements tends to fall on principal investigators, whereas it takes a village of stakeholders to construct, manage, and sustain the necessary knowledge infrastructure for disseminating data products. Individual scientists have mixed incentives, and many disincentives to share data, all of which vary by research domain, methods, resources, and other factors. Motivations and investments for data sharing also vary widely among academic institutional stakeholders such as university leadership, research computing, libraries, and individual schools and departments. Stakeholder concerns are interdependent along many dimensions, seven of which are explored: what data to share; context and credit; discovery; methods and training; intellectual property; data science programs; and international tensions. Data sharing is not a simple matter of individual practice, but one of infrastructure, institutions, and economics. Governments, funding agencies, and international science organizations all will need to invest in commons approaches for data sharing to develop into a sustainable international ecosystem.