Abstract
While science policy promotes data sharing and open data, these are not ends in themselves. Arguments for data sharing are to reproduce research, to make public assets available to the public, to leverage investments in research, and to advance research and innovation. To achieve these expected benefits of data sharing, data must actually be reused by others. Data sharing practices, especially motivations and incentives, have received far more study than has data reuse, perhaps because of the array of contested concepts on which reuse rests and the disparate contexts in which it occurs. Here we explicate concepts of data, sharing, and open data as a means to examine data reuse. We explore distinctions between use and reuse of data. Lastly we propose six research questions on data reuse worthy of pursuit by the community: How can uses of data be distinguished from reuses? When is reproducibility an essential goal? When is data integration an essential goal? What are the tradeoffs between collecting new data and reusing existing data? How do motivations for data collection influence the ability to reuse data? How do standards and formats for data release influence reuse opportunities? We conclude by summarizing the implications of these questions for science policy and for investments in data reuse.
Highlights
Over the last decade or so, a growing number of governments and funding agencies have promoted the sharing of scientific data as a means to make research products more widely available for research, education, business, and other purposes (European Commission High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data 2010; National Institutes of Health 2016; National Science Foundation 2011; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2007)
Rather than debate how much data sharing and reuse are occurring, here we focus on explicating data reuse as a concept that needs to be understood far more fully
The most fundamental problem in understanding data reuse is to distinguish between a “use” and a “reuse.” In the simplest situation, data are collected by one individual, for a specific research project, and the first “use” is by that individual to ask a specific research question
Summary
Over the last decade or so, a growing number of governments and funding agencies have promoted the sharing of scientific data as a means to make research products more widely available for research, education, business, and other purposes (European Commission High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data 2010; National Institutes of Health 2016; National Science Foundation 2011; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2007). The specifics of data sharing policies vary widely by research domain, country, and agency, but have many goals in common. Examples of sharing include private exchanges between researchers; posting datasets on researchers’ or laboratory websites; depositing datasets in archives, repositories, domain-specific collections, or library collections; and attaching data as supplemental materials in journal articles (Wallis et al 2013).
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