Abstract
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 17051 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-10 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Palgrave Communications |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Jun 2017 |
Funding
In 1942, when Robert K. Merton formulated his four norms that comprise the ethos of ethical science (universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism), he probably did not think of researchers archiving their data in a public repository. However, at least two of his norms relate directly to open access to research data, which means that data and supporting materials are made publicly available online (Berliner Erklärung, 2003). These are communism, the idea that there is a common ownership of scientific goods (here data), and organized skepticism, the idea that every scientist has the duty to let other researchers scrutinize his or her work (Merton, 1973). Well-documented and openly available datasets allow organized skepticism by enabling the replicability of research (Leonhart and Maurischat, 2004; Evans, 2010; Klein et al., 2013; McNutt, 2014a; Fecher et al., 2016). In this regard, open access to research data is a translation of the Mertonian norms for an ethical and democratic science to the digital age and a potential cure for the replication crisis we currently see in many scientific disciplines (McNutt, 2014a, 2016; Maxwell et al., 2015). And it is for these reasons that open access to research data is currently mandated by prominent funding agencies and science policy makers (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development., 2007; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2012). Combined the examples of replication studies, the avoidance of data duplications, and novel research approaches show that there lies great potential in the reuse of openly available data from small science, which remains almost untouched (Cragin et al., 2010). A study among 1329 environmental scientists from the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataOne) identified the lack of access to data from other researchers as the major obstacle to progress in the field (Tenopir et al., 2011). Half of the respondents state that their own research has suffered because they could not access data from others. In the same study, 46% of the researchers stated that they do not archive their data electronically. Only 6% said that they have stored data publicly at least once in the past. Campbell et al. (2002) surveyed 1240 genetic researchers from the 100 US universities that receive the most funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Forty-seven per cent of the surveyed researchers reported that they have been denied data by colleagues despite contacting them personally. Andreoli-Versbach and Mueller-Langer (2014) studied the data sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected economists. They found that only 12 (2.46%) provided open access to data that could be directly reused.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Institutes of Health | |
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft |