RESEARCH National Academies report calls for more data stewardship

Abstract

Digital technologies have allowed scientists to create an enormous amount of data that can be intricately processed by computer and stored in various electronic databases. At the same time, these capabilities have made it difficult to ensure the accuracy and completeness of data. Now, the National Academies has released a report that provides guidelines to ensure that scientific data in the digital era continue to be valid. “The report proposes general principles and makes recommendations that researchers, institutions, journals, and sponsors need to consider to ensure the integrity, accessibility, and stewardship of digital research data,” says Phillip A. Sharp, Institute Professor at MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and cochair of the Academies committee that wrote the report. Among these recommendations is that researchers should be better educated in the use of digital data. The report was prepared at the request of a number of scientific organizations, federal agencies, a...