Abstract:

Biodiversity research, conservation practices, natural resource management, and scientific decision-making increasingly depend on the sharing and integration of large amounts of primary data. In recent years, there has been an appeal increased sharing of biodiversity data, however, many scientists actively or passively resist sharing data. Some major cultural and technological obstacles exist among scientists, such as keeping data private to conduct other analyses, conflicts of interests with colleagues, lack of benefits, unfamiliarity with public databases, lack of user-friendly data submission tools, and lack of time and funding. One solution to improve the culture of data sharing is to provide benefits to scientists who share data (e.g. data citations). Recently, some organizations and scientists have advocated data publishing under peer review as a reward mechanism for individuals involved in data creation, management and sharing, and as a way to effectively increase the use and reuse of data. New data journals have been launched to fulfill the function of publishing data. In fact, besides the advocate of scholarly publication of data, an improved joint data archiving policy by databases and scientific journals may be more practically feasible to improve data sharing in a broader sense. In this article we review recent progress in data sharing and publishing and discuss to what extent data papers can boost data sharing and how to define ‘data sharing’ and ‘data publishing’. We also provide suggestions for improving data sharing by individual scientists, data repositories, journals, and funding agencies/institutions.

Key words: data publishing, data paper, data journal, science policy, science reproducibility, ecology, environmental conservation