Presentation and copyright worries keep scientists from sharing data

Organising data in a useful, presentable way is the biggest hurdle to sharing research data followed by worries about copyright, a survey of 7700 biological, Earth, medical and physical scientists has found.

The survey, carried out by the publishing company Springer Nature, revealed that 76% of researchers think it is important to make data generated by experiments available to others. This information helps researchers better understand or reproduce their colleagues’ experiments. However, in 2017, only about half of all data was shared. What is shared is often buried in supporting information files that vary wildly in format and content – a particular challenge for software gathering information for big data projects.