Open data shares are still in the minority in many fields. Although many researchers broadly agree that public access to raw data would accelerate science, most are reluctant to post the result of their own labors online. Some communities have agreed to share online—geneticists, for example, post DNA sequences at the GenBnak repository（库）, and astronomers are accustomed to accessing images of galaxies and stars from, say, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a telescope that has observed some 500 million objects—but these remain the exception, not the rule. Historically, scientists have objected to sharing for many reasons: It is a lot of work; until recently, good databases did not exist; grant funders were not pushing for sharing; it has been difficult to agree on standard for formatting data; and there is no agreed way to assign credit for data.
But the barriers are disappearing, in part because journals and funding agencies worldwide are encouraging scientists to make their data public. Last year, the Royal Society in London said in its report that scientist need to “shift away from a research culture where data is views as a private preserve”. Funding agencies note that data paid for with public money should be public information, and the scientific community is recognizing that data can now be shared digitally in ways that were not possible before. To match the growing demand, services are springing up to make it easier to publish research product online and enable other researchers to discover and cite them.
Although calls to share data often concentrate on the moral advantage of sharing, the practice is not purely altruistic（利他的）. Researchers who share plenty of personal benefit, including more connections with colleagues, improved visibility and increased citations. The most successful sharers—those whose data are downloaded and cited the most often—get noticed, and their work gets used. For example, one of the most popular data sets on multidisciplinary repository Dryad is about wood density around the world; it has been downloaded 5,700 times, Co-author Amy Zanne thinks that users probably range from climate-change researchers wanting to estimate how much carbon is stored in biomass, to foresters looking for information on different grades of timber, “I’d much prefer to have my data used by the maximum number of people to ask their own questions,” she says. “It’s important to allow readers and reviewers to see exactly how you arrive at your results. Publishing data and code allows your science to be reproducible.”
