Research funding agencies are now insisting that investigators make research data developed with their support accessible to others. The goals are to encourage openness and integrity in science, to ensure efficient use of research funds, and to provide training resources. This project examines data sharing behavior by creating a field experiment in which shared data are requested, used, and archived in a large and divrse teaching university. The project investigates how social scientists respond when asked for their data, what problems (e.g., ethical, attitudinal, financial) inhibit data sharing and how these may be mitigated; and what impact data sharing has on the interests, openness, and research activity of students and faculty who request and use data, and attend the workshops that are part of the project. The project will produce findings on data sharing and non-sharing behavior, findings on the uses, benefits, problems and teaching of data-sharing, particularly in primarily teaching universities, and models for university support for data sharing. Project results will be useful to science policy makers who seek to improve the effectiveness of data sharing, to faculty who want to use shared data in teaching research values and skills, and to university service and administrative staff who want to improve faculty and student skills in data use. This study grows out of the successful completion of a planning phase, which resulted in a session on data sharing at the AAAS annual meeting in 1989, in several articles published in IRB and elsewhere, and in a collection of papers under review for publication. Co-principal investigators are very well-qualified; institutional support is very good; the field research plans are good and should provide rich information about opportunities for and constraints on data sharing. Results will be widely disseminated and relevant to both researchers and educational policymakers. Support is recommended.
