Medical information provider BMJ Group, UK, has announced that authors whose research is accepted for publication in one of its most recent online-only titles, BMJ Open, can now share the original raw data for their study. They can do so on or after publication.
BMJ Open claims to be the first medical journal to partner with DryadUK, an online repository run by staff based at the British Library and University of Oxford. DryadUK provides a permanent, citable and accessible home for datasets related to peer reviewed published articles in biosciences. Authors can share datasets by depositing them in DryadUK, or another data repository, or by posting them on a website and then linking back to their BMJ Open article.
Data sharing is expected to help scientists and doctors validate and scrutinise researchers' findings. The aim is to prevent fraud and eradicate the kind of selective reporting that has enabled some treatments to acquire regulatory approval, based on incomplete and biased data. It is increasingly being encouraged by major academic research funders in the UK and the US, such as the Medical Research Council and the National Institutes of Health, for the benefit of both medical science and patients.
In some cases this lack of transparency has prompted the subsequent restriction or withdrawal of certain treatments because of patient safety or effectiveness concerns, which were already evident in the unpublished data.
Data repositories also allow researchers to develop new methods of analysis and use the data to answer questions that the original researchers have not thought of. They also facilitate the acquisition of data for meta analysis (more in-depth comparative reviews).
Data sharing is widespread in laboratory science, but is a new and more complex issue in medical research, because of the need to protect the privacy of research participants and/or seek their consent before sharing data. BMJ Open is said to provide plenty of practical, ethical and technical guidance on how to share data responsibly.
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