The Price of Openness – More Work or Higher Quality Research?
Unlike open access publishing, sharing research data rarely involves direct costs for researchers or universities. Many services designed for storing and preserving research data are available free of charge to users.
Making research data openly available does, however, require time and effort. A data management plan, required by many research funders, is often the first step that prompts researchers to consider sharing their data. Its purpose is to help researchers identify, already at the beginning of a project, the practices and solutions that will enable data sharing later on. For example, informing participants and obtaining any consent required for future use of the data should be considered during the data collection phase.
Documenting the data collection process is equally important. Well-documented data are more useful and easier to reuse. Descriptions of variables, together with information about when, where, and under what circumstances the data were collected, help others understand and assess the suitability of the data for their own research purposes.
A wide range of applications can be used for data analysis, but researchers often rely on scripts or code they have developed themselves. In line with the principles of openness, these methods should also be documented and shared alongside the data to improve the transparency of the research process.
Many research datasets contain personal data, which makes careful advance planning essential. Researchers must consider what information will be collected, how participants will be informed, what risks may be associated with processing the data, and how the data will be handled in collaboration with possible project partners. If the data are intended for broader reuse, identifiable information generally needs to be anonymised. Effective data protection depends above all on proactive planning, as retrospective corrections are often difficult or impossible to make.
The activities described above can be viewed as costs that add to a researcher’s workload. Alternatively, they can be seen as part of good scientific practice, the neglect of which may, in the worst case, constitute a violation of research integrity. If the data underlying a study are not available, how can the findings be verified?
Promoting openness requires time and expertise, but it is not merely additional work. Careful data management, transparent research methods, and adherence to the FAIR principles improve the quality, reliability, and impact of research. Openly shared datasets also save time and resources for other researchers, who may be able to reuse existing data rather than collect similar data themselves. Further information on these and many other aspects of research data management can be found in our guide.
Did you know that support for research data management is available from the Research Data Services at researchdata [at] tuni.fi (researchdata[at]tuni[dot]fi)? We also offer a data manager service for research projects, with costs covered through project budgets according to the hours allocated to the service.
