Five essential factors for data sharing

Five Essential Factors for Data Sharing proposes five measures that will help in making data sharing more efficient and ensure good data practice. Bringing together survey results from more than 11,000 researchers, we explore the challenges they face, as well as their attitudes and behaviours towards data sharing.

To enable researchers to move beyond key obstacles and increase data sharing we propose five essential factors:

• Clear policy setting specific requirements for data management and sharing that will be shared amongst all the different stakeholders. 
• Better credit for researchers with formal recognition to make data sharing worth a researcher’s time.
• Explicit funding for data management and data sharing, as well as data publishing.
• Practical help for organizing data, finding appropriate repositories and provision of faster, easier routes to share data.
• Training and education to answer common questions from researchers on data sharing and help build skills and knowledge.

The whitepaper is available to read and download at figshare.