03/30/2022

Guest Post: A Decade of Open Data in Research

Real change or slow moving compliance?

Editor's note: Today's post is by Mark Hahnel. Mark is the CEO and founder of Figshare, which currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers, and funders globally.

There has been much made of the recent Nature news declaration of the NIH Data Policy (from January 2023) as "seismic." In my opinion, it truly is. Many others will argue that the language is not strong enough. But for me, the fact that the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world is telling researchers to share their data demonstrates how fast the push for open academic data is accelerating.

While a lot of the focus is on incentive structures and the burden for researchers, the academic community should not lose focus on the potential "seismic" benefits that open data can have for reproducibility and efficiency in research, as well as the ability to move further and faster when it comes to knowledge advancement.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.