Widespread lack of support to help researchers share data, report finds

Almost three-quarters of researchers surveyed for the eighth annual "The State of Open Data" report have said they are not getting the support they need to share data openly, with a lack of credit given for sharing data also cited as a major drawback.

Six thousand researchers internationally took part in the survey, for Digital Science, Figshare and Springer Nature, with the greatest numbers coming from India (12%), China (11%) and the US (9%).

Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they had never received any support for making their data openly available, while 60% believed they had not received credit for doing so.

For the minority who had received support, the bulk (61%) said it had come from a colleague or supervisor, followed by institutional libraries (31%), research office or in-house expertise (26%), publishers (21%) and funders (17%).

Meanwhile, asked for the first time for the report whether they were using AI to make support the data-sharing process, almost half of respondents were aware of generative AI tools for data collection, but most were not yet using them.

However, Graham Smith, Open Data programme manager at Springer Nature, noted that the figures showed that researchers publishing in the last year were "significantly more likely to share data due to a funder requirement" than those publishing earlier. 

He said: "At Springer Nature we are taking concrete action to encourage researchers to share their data such as with our single data policy and requiring data availability statements. This, we believe, will help authors in opening up their data for further reuse and interrogation.”

Digital Science c.e.o. Daniel Hook said: “’The State of Open Data’ report has become a unique, long-term resource chronicling the establishment of open data, attitudes towards it, and researchers’ experiences of data sharing. It’s my hope that readers of the report will not only better understand what the research community is experiencing and achieving now, but what the opportunities are for the future.”