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Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions

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The role of policies in supporting research data sharing

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HRA webinar, Nov 2022

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Policies support and reflect cultural change

  • A (lenient) policy is often a first step towards raising awareness of data sharing and creating change. Scores of funders and thousands of journals now have them.�
  • More than half of researchers (n=6104) say they are motivated to share data because of journal requirements and nearly half by funder and institution requirements1�
  • Mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript greatly improve the odds of finding the data online compared to journals with no policy2
  1. The State of Open Data 2022. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21276984.v5
  2. Vines, et al (2013), The FASEB Journal, 27: 1304-1308. https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.12-218164

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Mandatory policies are far more effective

Data availability statements mandatory at PLOS & BMC (~95% compliance)

Data availability statements (DAS) optional at BMC (~5% compliance)

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  1. Colavizza et al. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416

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Steady increase in use of data repositories (best practice) to share data supporting publications at PLOS

% of PLOS publications that link to research data in a repository

17%

20%

21%

23%

26%

28%

31%

Using data repositories to share data is best practice

Linking articles to data in a repository is correlated with a 25% increase in citations

Colavizza et al., (2020) PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230416

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What else have we learned? What is next?

Mandatory policies have benefits but incur costs (+25 minutes of work per article on average at PLOS)

Researchers need support to understand and comply with journal data availability policies

Collaboration across publishers and stakeholders (e.g. funders) to improve quality/ impact of data policies

Target measurable improvements in volume and quality of data sharing – and share our progress

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Track PLOS’ progress at increasing good Open Science practices with our “Open Science Indicators” project

https://theplosblog.plos.org/2022/09/plos-partners-with-dataseer-to-develop-open-science-indicators

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ihrynaszkiewicz@plos.org

Thank you for listening