Research Data Thing 5/23 - Data Sharing

One of the questions raised in Thing 5 is about different ways to make data more openly available.

I'm not sure whether there are shades of openness, but I think there are certainly open data sets which are more easily found and accessed than others. Factors include:

  • marketing/promotion - are researchers and data stewards communicating at appropriate times about the data? On release, at time of updates, augmentation, new data formats released etc, when related topics are in the news.
  • audience targeting - are the communications in the most relevant channels as well as more generally for those serendipitous connections
  • search engine optimisation - is the repository well indexed and is the data description good
  • identification of the data - the use of DOIs for journal articles is now starting to expand to data sets. In Australia ANDS DOI service is expanding to cover grey literature. This provides a unique identifier that can be used in other services (altmetrics and research data management systems, etc) and I believe this would have a spin off effect of improving findability.