Why share data?
Data sharing is central to open science. When you share your data, you show your support for the future of science—for its openness, its reproducibility, and its longevity. Responsible and open data sharing allows you to demonstrate the rigor and reliability of your work to others, and by doing so, you invite them to review, reproduce, and reuse your materials, potentially advancing new discoveries. For biomedical data, data sharing can lead to new treatments, therapies, and even cures, improving patient outcomes. Data sharing also contributes to the public good: it can build trust in science, and increase access to scientific knowledge.
Beyond philosophical reasons, data sharing is also required by many funding organizations, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and many other governing bodies, foundations, and journal publications.
What is data sharing?
What exactly is data sharing? In general, data sharing means making data available to others in a responsible way. This can include the following additional steps: providing information about the data such as abstracts, code, and protocols; ensuring access controls are in place for sensitive data; embargoing data for a specified period; de-identifying data; and, adding information about the data (called metadata or annotations) to enable data discovery and querying.
These days, many researchers share data via online repositories equipped with features such as file storage, data annotation tools, security protocols, and search functionality. Some well-known scientific data repositories include GEO, cBioPortal, figshare, etc. At Sage, data are stored and curated in a platform called Synapse, and made explorable through data portals.
How do I share my data?
While the exact process has some variations across our data portals and repositories, data sharing at Sage consists of the following steps:
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