<p>So, now that we’ve identified what data might mean for you, why should you actually share it? What are the benefits? </p>
By providing access to your data and source materials, as well as comprehensive information about them, others can reproduce the research. This can help to corroborate findings and, in turn, build trust in results.
When you enable the replication and validation of your research, others can ensure your conclusions are built upon a firm foundation, helping to demonstrate its robustness within the research community and beyond.
If you publish your research as an article and deposit datasets in a repository, your work can be found via both routes. This can lead to more visibility of the research.
Additionally, there is evidence that open data sharing is associated with increased citations, with one study finding that sharing data openly in repositories is associated with up to 25% more citations to the research paper.
If your data is cited by another researcher in their work, you will get credit as the person who created it. Similarly, other stakeholders and third parties, such as museums and libraries, also get credit for making resources available.
When data is openly available, research becomes more efficient by removing duplication of efforts from other researchers. Rather than needing to focus efforts on collecting or creating the same datasets, new studies can focus on novel questions to accelerate discovery, and researchers can build on existing research to streamline new efforts.
When data is open, researchers, policymakers and other community stakeholders can collaborate and form new partnerships more easily which, in turn, can help to boost real-world impact of research and solve global challenges.