“It’s about incentivisation. We can build as many repositories as we like but if we can’t convince people to populate them with quality materials and then reuse them, then we have to question the investment we are making in the activity.”
University of Leicester
“We need to find incentives that work for both the researcher and the institution. Studies show positive correlations between placing data on a well-managed repository and the impact of that research. That has value for the researcher and for the institution.”
“We need incentives but also to look outside the institution at the research councils and other funders at ways to encourage them to take research data seriously. Data production should be valued as highly as a journal article.”
“Researchers have to go over enormous hurdles. They have so much else they need to get done. We need to make the whole structure clearer and simpler.”
“There is the incentive of making it easy but also the incentive of visibility and impact. The more we can gather real examples of this the better."
chancellor, University of Edinburgh and chair
of JISC
“It strikes me that researchers’ trust in data management systems is important. We have helped our researchers in our department to manage data because we are in that department. It’s about colleagues they know and trust and creating a centre of excellence. A researcher submitting data into the void to data.ac.uk is less appealing. Personal relationships are vitally important in research, we cannot treat things mechanically."
“In social science increasingly data is being generated in one context and used by people in another, so there will be the need for a cultural change in that context because people will not necessarily collect their own data and will use data from elsewhere.”
education, University of Bristol
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Research data management quiz
An earlier debate entitled ‘should researchers share data?’
Opinion piece by JISC’s Simon Hodson in Research Information magazine exploring how technology and funding practices have changed the way researchers share data
Read JISC’s advice on research integrity: making a start with managing your research data