Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career

• Opening up data can yield benefits: it can catalyse new collaborations, increase confidence in findings and generate goodwill among researchers.
• Data sharing can benefit not just the recipients of data, but also the sharers. Papers that were based on openly shared data were published in journals of equal impact as often as were those based on non-shared data.
• A major hindrance is concern about the legality of sharing data, especially when the research subjects are people, Tenopir has found. Researchers should also consider ethical issues before making data available on, for instance, rural villages or local environmental factors in low-income countries, which could compromise the privacy or well-being of residents.