Data Sharing from the Perspective of Individual Scientists.

Society’s need for sound environmental science has escalated alongside the rise of  “big data” across all sectors of society, creating new opportunities for advancing science and resource management through data-intensive approaches. The era of big data need not be propelled exclusively by “big science” - a term used to describe large-scale efforts in which most environmental scientists historically have not been involved. Individual environmental scientists can and should drive forward data-intensive approaches by engaging in collaborative syntheses and sharing their heterogeneous, high-value data. Such individual efforts are ideally designed to be complementary to and synergistic with "big science" efforts that continue to grow. As data become less expensive to generate and more publicly available, individual scientists will  leverage their expertise by leveraging their data – inviting globally distributed colleagues to find them by advertising their deep knowledge, data, and openness to collaborate. Environmental scientists have long perceived numerous sociocultural and technical obstacles to data sharing; studies demonstrate that are some are real but some are largely fiction. On balance, forward-looking environmental scientists are joining the larger scientific community in global efforts to address major scientific and societal problems, by bringing their distributed data to the table and harnessing its collective power. The scientists bringing the information forward are at the forefront of socially relevant science.