Data Requirements and Responsibility: Panelists Discuss Sharing the Load

MODERATOR: Shari Leventhal American Society of Nephrology SPEAKERS: Shannon Farrell University of Minnesota Jenny Peng Oxford University Press Duncan MacRae Wolters Kluwer Emma Shumyeko The National Academy of Sciences REPORTER: Jennifer Parresol Sharing and standardizing data provides many benefits to research and readers. With this comes challenges within workflows and legal and ethical consideration. Standardizing data across the board leads to better discoverability, along with enhancing open access compliance, improving metadata quality, and connecting stakeholders. To move toward standardization of various constituents, journals, authors, and editors need to work together to improve adherence to data standards and requirements. This may include cross-industries collaboration to harmonize data sharing workflows, as current workflows between journals and repositories are often at odds, inhibiting curation. With data sharing and standardizing come challenges in not only preparing data for sharing, but in the time it may take, which could require significant efforts. Cost can also come into play. The average yearly cost for data management systems (DMS) across institutions is $750,000, whereas the average cost per funded project is $29,800, with smaller grants being significantly less (Figure 1). Funding is just one of the things to consider for data sharing and standardizing for both authors and publishers. Legal and ethical compliances, which may include sensitive personal data that could be subject to regulations, would need to be examined. Data integrity ensures that shared datasets are complete and accurate. It is important to have trusted safe repositories for authors to upload their data. How do we […]