Ethical and Practical Considerations in Data Sharing.

Making public the data that support the conclusions in scientific publications would appear to be among the most basic of scientific ethical principles. However, like many ethical principles, widespread adoption of data sharing in practice has been limited by technology, by resistance in the scientific community, and by a lack of practical guidelines for data sharing and reuse. Technological barriers to data sharing in biology are largely disappearing with the development of data repositories like Dryad and GenBank, and with the availability of tools to facilitate sharing provided by organizations like the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. The World Data Centre for Soils and the soils database of Landcare Research provide examples of similar facilities for soil science. With respect to community issues, in the early 2000’s, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) organized a series of NSF-sponsored workshops bringing together representatives of professional societies and other organizations in ecology, evolution, and organismal biology. The discussions focused on how to encourage data sharing and on the resources needed to make that possible. A vision statement adopted by twelve professional societies stated “Our vision as members of the scientific community is to promote the advancement of science through the process of documenting, archiving, and making available the research information and supporting data of published studies.” These efforts contributed to ESA’s own adoption of mandatory sharing of data related to publications in its journals Ecological Monographs and Ecological Applications. Further, collaboration between ESA and DataONE led to the development of proposed ethical guidelines for data reuse, published in the journal BioScience. This presentation will summarize the evolution of data sharing from ethical principle to practice increasingly adopted, with direct benefits to individual researchers, the scientific community, and society as a whole.