Open Access

"Open data" is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike (from the Open Data Handbook). The Open Data movement began with efforts to improve access to government data (see data.gov).  This page focuses on open scientific data: the primary research data published within or alongside research papers.

Check out this Open Data factsheet from SPARC!

(Image credit)

"Openness increases transparency and reliability, facilitates more effective collaboration, accelerates the pace of discovery, and fosters broader and more equitable access to scientific knowledge and to the research process itself."
— National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25116

Transparency

• Allows data to be audited

Innovation

• Data can be reused or recombined in unexpected ways
• Data can be used to plan new studies
• New markets for services related to curation, preservation, analysis, visualization

Efficiency

• Focus resources and efforts appropriately
• Avoid repeating studies
• Avoid repeating mistakes
• Work smarter and more quickly
• Prevent loss of data - A Canadian study reported that 80% of scientific data are lost within two decades: The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age  (Current Biology, 19 December 2013)

Impact

• Studies show that papers with publicly available datasets receive a higher number of citations: Data reuse and the open data citation advantage (PeerJ, 1 October 2013)

Success stories of how open data has made a difference

• From the NCBI Insights blog, 16 September 2013: "NCBI’s Open Data – A Source of Experimental Data for Important Discoveries".  This post summarizes 3 recent cases where researchers used data from GEO, PubChem, and dbGaP to make significant discoveries.
• "Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimers", by Gina Kolata, New York Times, 12 August  2010

eScholarship@UMassChan can serve as a home for research data files that support scholarly publications, including dissertations, theses, and journal articles that must meet requirements for the preservation and dissemination of data.

Benefits of sharing your data through eScholarship@UMassChan:

• it is free to you
• it can accommodate large file sizes and a variety of file formats
• it can apply embargoes for access controls
• it can provide a persistent identifier, such as a DOI
• it can provide a Creative Commons license
• it supplies usage metrics to help measure research impact
• it includes sufficient metadata to enable discovery and reuse
• it is a redundant copy of your data in the event that something should happen to your original
• it is managed by the library

View this example of a data set housed in eScholarship@UMassChan

There are many options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication, including government-sponsored repositories, disciplinary repositories, third-party repositories, and the UMass Chan institutional repository, eScholarship@UMassChan.

For large datasets, here are selected data repositories for the biological sciences:

Data journals are publications whose purpose is to expose and share research data, and to promote its re-use.  Examples of data journals: