Data sharing behaviour: ideal vs practice

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Munich studied of the data sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected empirical researchers.

"We find empirical support for the hypotheses that voluntary data-sharing significantly increases with (a) academic tenure, (b) the quality of researchers, (c) the share of published articles subject to a mandatory data-disclosure policy of journals, and (d) personal attitudes towards “open science” principles. On the basis of our empirical evidence, we discuss a set of policy recommendations".

Highlights

• Data-sharing in economics is often professed but seldom practised.

• We find that 80.74% of researchers do not voluntarily share their data.

• We derive five testable hypotheses based on the literature on information-sharing.

• We find four significant predictors of voluntary data-sharing: tenure, author quality, extent of mandatory data-disclosure and personal attitudes.

Full article "Open access to data: An ideal professed but not practised" at: doi:10.1016/j.respol.2014.04.008