Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that data sharing has great potential for scientific progress. However, so far making data available has little impact on a researcher’s reputation. Thus, data sharing can be conceptualized as a social dilemma. In the presented study we investigated the influence of the researcher's personality within the social dilemma of data sharing. The theoretical background was the appropriateness framework. We conducted a survey among 1564 researchers about data sharing, which also included standardized questions on selected personality factors, namely the so-called Big Five, Machiavellianism and social desirability. Using regression analysis, we investigated how these personality domains relate to four groups of dependent variables: attitudes towards data sharing, the importance of factors that might foster or hinder data sharing, the willingness to share data, and actual data sharing. Our analyses showed the predictive value of personality for all four groups of dependent variables. However, there was not a global consistent pattern of influence, but rather different compositions of effects. Our results indicate that the implications of data sharing are dependent on age, gender, and personality. In order to foster data sharing, it seems advantageous to provide more personal incentives and to address the researchers’ individual responsibility.
Highlights
At the present there is a lively discussion about open science and open data in the scientific community
Based on the appropriateness framework for decision making in social dilemmas [9] we argue that individual decisions about data sharing are based on the subjective perception of the data sharing situation in academia, the researcher’s identity, and the application of individual rules and heuristics
We provide a short overview of selected personality factors and present empirical findings on their relation to workplace behavior and cooperation in social dilemmas
Summary
At the present there is a lively discussion about open science and open data in the scientific community. Data sharing contributes to the quality and quantity of research. It enables datadriven replication studies and allows to pursue new research questions on the basis of secondary data [1,2]. Even though the potential of openly available data is widely acknowledged, actual data sharing is rather limited [3,4,5]. For example: In a study among environmental scientists, Tenopir and colleagues [5] found that less than 6% of the surveyed researchers make all of their data available. In a study among researchers from different disciplines, Fecher and colleagues [2] found that only 13% had made their own data publicly available in the past. Related prior research showed that most factors related to data
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