Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research, has launched its annual report, The State of Open Data 2018, to coincide with global celebrations around Open Access Week. The report is the third in the series and includes survey results and a collection of articles from global industry experts, as well as a foreword from Ross Wilkinson, Global Strategy at the Australian Research Data Commons.
Two years on from the first report in 2016, which was created to examine attitudes and experiences of researchers working with open data - sharing it, reusing it, redistributing it - survey results continue to show encouraging progress, that open data is becoming more embedded in the research community.
For this year's survey, as with previous years, Figshare partnered with Springer Nature, to ensure as diverse an audience as possible.
Key findings include: 64 percent of respondents revealed they made their data openly available in 2018, a 7 percent rise on 2016. Data citations are motivating more respondents to make data openly available, increasing 7 percent from 2017 to 46 percent. 60 percent of respondents had never heard of FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability - provide a guideline for data producers and publishers to enhance the reusability of academic data). The percentage of respondents in support of national mandates for open data is higher at 63 percent than in 2017 (55 percent). Respondents who revealed that they had reused open data in their research continues to shrink. In 2018 48 percent said they had done this, whereas in 2017 50 percent had done so, with 2016 57 percent in 2016. Most researchers felt that they did not get sufficient credit for sharing data (58 percent), compared to 9 percent who felt they do. Respondents having lost research data has decreased from 2017 (36 percent versus 30 percent in 2018).
The percentage of respondents who reported being familiar with the FAIR principles was just 15 percent with 25 percent having previously heard of FAIR and 60 percent never having heard of them.
The results confirmed that despite publishers, funders and institutions rapidly adopting these principles, there remains a crucial gap in educating researchers. They further show the need for initiatives like Go Fair, which gives researchers clear instructions on how to be FAIR compliant.
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