Simon Hodson of JISC examines how technology and funding policies have changed the ways that researchers share data

As digital technologies are expanding the power and reach of research, they are also raising complex issues. These include complications in ensuring the validity of research data; standards that do not keep pace with the high rate of innovation; restrictions on data sharing that reduce the ability of researchers to verify results and build on previous research; and huge increases in the amount of data being generated, creating severe challenges in preserving that data for long-term use. Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age examines the consequences of the changes affecting research data with respect to three issues - integrity, accessibility, and stewardship-and finds a need for a new approach to the design and the management of research projects. The report recommends that all researchers receive appropriate training in the management of research data, and calls on researchers to make all research data, methods, and other information underlying results publicly accessible in a timely manner. The book also sees the stewardship of research data as a critical long-term task for the research enterprise and its stakeholders. Individual researchers, research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, and journals involved in scientific, engineering, and medical research will find this book an essential guide to the principles affecting research data in the digital age.

OA data: recent discussion and announcements

Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets. The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies. In The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, the collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized.

BioTorrents is a website that allows open access sharing of scientific data. It uses the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology to allow rapid file transferring.

Mission: • To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic • stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives • To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. • To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Researchers are driven by a desire to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the world we inhabit, and to communicate their findings to others. But both governments and other funders are increasingly interested in demonstrating the social and economic returns from their investments in research, and in assessing research performance. The many different criteria for success, and the lack of any consensus on how success should be assessed or measured, however, mean that researchers often find themselves in receipt of confused or conflicting messages. And they are pulled in different directions in deciding which channels of communication they should adopt. This report is complimented by four supporting papers which provide detailed descriptions of the methods used, a full analysis of the data, and further details of the findings.

Doesn’t peer review offer some guarantee of quality?, suggests Harford. “Peer review is of minimal value” is the response to this, “…checkability is what really guarantees quality”. Senn goes on to suggest that scientists sign an undertaking to provide raw original data to anyone who requests it.

Sharing data is good. But sharing your own data? That can get complicated. As two research communities who held meetings in May on the issue report their proposals to promote data sharing in biology, a special issue of Nature examines the cultural and technical hurdles that can get in the way of good intentions.