This project investigates current practices and attitudes relating to the sharing and re-use of electronic research data among faculty and research staff at Iowa State University. Federal policy encourages and indeed requires in many cases that researchers make available for re-use research datasets created as a result of federally funded research projects. A number of previous studies have found that although scholars widely affirm the value of research data sharing in principle they have often failed in practice to share their own data in formats that are accessible for re-use. This project investigates the reasons for the divergence between the ideals of open science and actual practice to provide an evidence base for the development of more effective and efficient policies for data sharing and to facilitate development of university infrastructure to better support research data sharing. The results of this research will contribute to the development and implementation of data sharing policies that are more effective in facilitating data re-use while reducing the cost to investigators and universities of compliance with these policies. Enhanced data sharing will, in turn, contribute to more rapid scientific progress.
The project coincides with a new institutional initiative at Iowa State University to establish more robust institutional support for the ideals of data sharing and re-use, and a central question in the investigation is what institutional approaches are most effective in supporting increased data sharing. An initial survey of faculty and research staff will be used to establish a baseline measure of existing formal and informal practices for data sharing and data re-use and their variations by discipline, career stage, and other investigator characteristics. A follow up survey administered 18 to 24 months later will assess the impact on data sharing of new university policies and infrastructure to support data sharing. In addition, information on investigator follow through with data management plans for funded projects will be analyzed, and data on implicit and explicit costs of implementing data management plans will be collected and analyzed to illuminate the extent to which these costs affect compliance.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
