Toward a New Era of Data Sharing: Summary of the US-UK Scientific Forum on Researcher Access to Data (2024)
Chapter: 8 Takeaway Messages
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Suggested Citation:
"8 Takeaway Messages." National Academy of Sciences. 2024. Toward a New Era of Data Sharing: Summary of the US-UK Scientific Forum on Researcher Access to Data. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/27520.
8 | TAKEAWAY MESSAGES
IN THE FINAL SESSION of the forum, members of the organizing committee identified the main messages that they were taking away from the forum. These should be seen not as observations or recommendations of either the Royal Society or the National Academy of Sciences but as points of departure for further deliberations and action.
What Are the Challenges?
- Large data” can include any dataset where the tools to mine, interpret, and share the data are lacking. (Feryal Özel)
- Reticence for sharing data can hinge on different factors, including a desire for credit for collecting the data, financial reasons, or a lack of resources. (Feryal Özel)
- Different disciplines have much to learn from each other regarding shared problems and best practices. (Nigel Shadbolt)
- Legislation is changing in different jurisdictions, which will have implications regarding researcher access to social media data and similar kinds of data. (Gina Neff)
- All research problems involving data, whether in academia, government, or the private sector, have a behavioral science component. (Feryal Özel)
- The problems posed by data access are social problems that need to be addressed with the tools of the social sciences, including norms, codes of conduct, incentives, disincentives, and governance. (Arturo Casadevall)
What Needs to Be Done?
- Sharing data requires resources, frameworks, standards, trained people (including data stewards), methods of curation, and metadata generation. It is not something that can be done in a postdoc’s free time. (Feryal Özel)
- Frameworks and format standards for data and metadata should be determined jointly between the people who are generating the data and the larger communities that are using the data, with oversight boards where necessary. (Feryal Özel)
- Data sharing requires the building of data infrastructure and a focus on sustainability. (Gina Neff)
- In all disciplines and at all organizational levels, data should not be seen as something that can be owned but as something that can be released and reused. (Richard Sever)
- The need to preserve and share data extends beyond individual researchers to the much larger institutions of which researchers are a part. (Jamie Austin)
Suggested Citation:
"8 Takeaway Messages." National Academy of Sciences. 2024. Toward a New Era of Data Sharing: Summary of the US-UK Scientific Forum on Researcher Access to Data. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/27520.
- The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a revolution in how data are accessed and used, and the lessons from the pandemic need to be both acknowledged and extended, especially given the inevitability of future pandemics. (Jamie Austin)
- Data are not in and of themselves a business, but a business perspective is needed as government and other funders think about long-term preservation of data. (Richard Sever)
- Learned societies—including the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences—government, data institutions, and individual researchers all have roles to play in creating a sustainable data infrastructure. (Gina Neff)
- Generative artificial intelligence could help data scientists by doing some of the routine data engineering that currently requires time-consuming and expensive manual work on data assets. (Nigel Shadbolt)
- Increased opportunities to earn professional awards could act as incentives to data sharing. (Feryal Özel)
- Incentives can be professional, personal, economic, regulatory, or statutory, and all these incentives need to be aligned with data sharing. (Nigel Shadbolt)
- Given the ongoing risk that public goods could be enclosed for private purposes, public discourse needs to center on the value of data and on the value to private organizations of these public goods being maintained. (Nigel Shadbolt)
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