Abstract
Data sharing attitudes and practices of the faculty of the plant sciences departments at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities were explored in a mixed method study consisting of an online survey and semi-structured in-depth interviews. Results show the majority of participating faculty responded positively regarding data sharing and practice it in some form. However, several challenges exist, such as the time needed to prepare metadata, long-term storage and preservation, collaboration and communication with fellow researchers, and gaps in coding skill. Librarians are uniquely suited to help researchers face these challenges and support increased data sharing.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 37-58 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Journal of Agricultural and Food Information |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Participants noted that collaboration and communication with colleagues provided challenges to sharing data. International collaborations can be challenging due to other countries having different requirements for the sharing of data, resulting in projects where only a portion of the data end up publicly shared. As one participant noted, “They don’t have the same requirements to make data available publicly that we do in the US. If you are funded by a federal agency. And so when we do collaborative work we can’t make their data available.” Another difficulty with collaborative work can be found in the collection and organization of data from coauthors. Several participants discussed having to take on the role of data wrangler to ensure that all the data from a project are collected in the designated location: “But probably the biggest barrier to sharing things is getting everything you need from coauthors organized. We have a major manuscript right now that has this submission going in and getting relatively large amounts of data pulled together from multiple authors and having all the metadata available and everything is non-trivial. So that’s probably the single biggest issue.”
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Keywords
- Coding skills
- data sharing
- faculty attitudes
- plant sciences
- research data