The Life-Changing Magic of Sharing Your Data

It is increasingly expected that scientists not only publish results from their research, but also freely share the raw data and analysis pipelines leading to those results. Such data sharing is widely considered beneficial by other scientists, journals, funding agencies, and by society as a whole.

These benefits to society are all well and good. But what about ourselves? How does data sharing reward the scientist whose motivation is driven more by personal ambition than by idealism? Whose data is now being freely given away to their competitors? Whose time and effort could surely be better invested on writing yet more papers, rather than wasted on tidying their datasets and scripts for repositories?

In this talk, I will argue that data sharing is fact beneficial to such avaricious self-interested scientists, as well as those who are more munificent and public-spirited in nature. I will discuss ways in which data sharing can lead to the advancement of one’s own career, accelerate the pace of one’s own scientific discoveries, and greaten the impact of one’s own research output. I will then describe tools and repositories that are currently available to facilitate data sharing, illustrate this with some examples from my own and others’ work, and discuss recent efforts at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging to move towards data sharing and open science practices.

Further information: ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk