Lessons for data sharing from institutional repositories

Governments and institutions are increasingly interested in promoting open sharing of research data through institutional repositories: showcasing quality research data brings prestige to institutions and gives governments a visible return on financial investment in research and development. While the incentives for open data are clear for institutions and governments, any attempt to create an open data climate depends on the researchers who will choose to share their data (or not). Early attempts to foster an open data movement have met with little interest or action on the part of researchers, a result reminiscent of early attempts to recruit publications to institutional repositories. In this paper we draw on the institutional repositories literature to identify five major barriers to open data sharing: (dis)incentives, difficulty, danger, and existing disciplinary sharing practices. To change practice (and data sharing would be a major change for many disciplines), sufficient incentives must be in place to overcome old habits. There is currently little reward for researchers in data sharing: the risks are high and there are no research metrics available for measuring the impact of shared data. With so little incentive, the barrier to participation must be very low; however data sharing and curation are difficult at best. There are no standard ways to describe data, meaning cataloguing is taxing for both researchers and the repository librarians who would assist them. Not only is data sharing low-benefit and difficult, it is threatening to researchers: it may alienate their participants, and research data could be ill-used or misinterpreted. Finally, those who already share data in their own disciplines are unlikely to be willing to change their practice to meet institutional requirements: it is simply not worth it to them. The institutional repository literature highlights all these problems, and may even provide insight into some solutions.