Data is not always thought of as a publishable, shareable output of research in the same way that articles, reports and books are, but there are many compelling reasons why you should consider sharing your data.

Benefits to the researcher

  • Find and develop new and existing collaborations
  • Improve impact of research through uptake by practitioners and industry
  • Improve impact of research through data reuse by other researchers
  • Increase visibility of research (including more citations)
  • Improve trust in published research findings
  • Encourage others to share data you could use
  • Comply with funder, publisher and institutional policies

Benefits to the research community

  • Enable full value to be extracted from large datasets
  • Enable unforeseen reuses of data
  • Enable new research questions integrating multiple data sources
  • Enable testing and development of new techniques on existing data
  • Improve efficiency by building on existing data instead of regenerating it
  • Improve reliability and integrity of research record
  • Support open scientific enquiry

Benefits to the general public

  • Improve return on investment for research funding
  • Reduce the need for similar experiments to be repeated