Governance and stewardship for research data and information sharing: Issues and prospective solutions in the transdisciplinary plant phenotyping and imaging research center network

Abstract

Societal Impact StatementHigh‐throughput plant phenotyping is a transdisciplinary field of research that provides a systematic approach to assessing and understanding the life cycle of plants and aims to integrate plant genotype with plant ecophysiology and agronomy. Sharing data and information (D&I) is key to accelerating new scientific breakthroughs and innovations in plant phenotyping. The development of a governance and stewardship framework can overcome institutional, legal, and technical barriers that limit D&I sharing. This framework governs how decisions are made about D&I, how researchers engage with each other to manage D&I, and improves the content, discoverability, accessibility, and usability of D&I from different sources.Summary Despite the widely acknowledged value to be added by sharing research data and information (D&I), significant institutional, legal, and technical barriers remain to be addressed, particularly in managing transdisciplinary research. The Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) offers an illuminating case study in how various researchers are exchanging their D&I to accommodate the requirements of transdisciplinary research. Using social network analysis to explore the current state of D&I sharing in P2IRC, we found that D&I sharing was modest, with most exchanges taking place between academic researchers and predominantly within the same discipline. Lacking benefits arising from broader dissemination, scholars are not optimally sharing their D&I. Many researchers identified a range of barriers that limited sharing. These barriers are mainly rooted in the absence of D&I governance and stewardship. To overcome barriers, we offer recommendations and solutions for developing a governance and stewardship framework that is tailored to the P2IRC project, but relevant to the wider research world. This includes how to assist adoption of a governance model, accountability and oversight mechanisms, and an operational framework for effective data collection, analysis, possession, and dissemination. We provide recommendations that enable data stewards to preserve and improve the content, discoverability accessibility, and usability of data and metadata by making data interoperable from semantic, syntactic/technical, and legal perspectives. A governance framework would help open all aspects of research outputs, while achieving the access and benefit‐sharing (ABS) goal and contributing to the preservation and sustainable use of D&I.