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We believe that data should be open, accessible and reusable. Data sharing helps speed up the pace of discovery and its benefits to society.

As a proactive partner to the research community, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø is pioneering new approaches to and open data. We’re committed to supporting researchers in sharing their data, helping to make data sharing the new normal.

Data publishing

Through data publishing, we aim to make scientific data more reusable, discoverable, interpretable, and citable.

We facilitate data publishing in open access journals Scientific Data and BMC Research Notes; through Registered Reports in BMC journals; and pilot projects on data citation and data badges.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø’s flagship open data journal, , offers authors the opportunity to describe and share their research data with a wide audience. 

publishes dark data - single observations, short null results, orphan data and confirmatory results. The â€˜data note’ article type offers authors a peer-reviewed, citeable summary of their data.

Our research data helpdesk helps authors and editors find out how best to deal with their data and understand funder and institute mandates. With journal-level research data policies, we ensure that the data at the heart of scholarly research are appropriately archived and, where possible, widely accessible.

Supporting open data sharing

Open science is about innovation. We are committed to building on our open science policies with practical tools that help researchers share data, code and methods when they publish with us.

Here we outline some of the solutions that have been piloted on selected journals and are now being progressively integrated more widely across ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø portfolios. 

Integrated data sharing with figshare 

  • Authors can upload and publish datasets directly during manuscript submission, without leaving the submission system.
  1. Simplifies the process of depositing and linking data 
  2. Improves compliance with journal and funder requirements 
  3. Increases visibility and reuse of datasets

Impact

  • Increased use of repositories and measurable growth in data sharing following integration (12% increase in published data at piloted journals) 
  • Evidence of higher citation impact for articles with linked datasets in some fields

Featured white papers and reports

We monitor data sharing attitudes and behaviours, building evidence and advocating for good data practice. Discover our latest white papers and reports:






  • . With a wide range of opinions and commentary, this white paper looks at the real-world impact of FAIR, and considers what will be next for research data and open science.

  •  Based on a survey of 7,700 researchers, this white paper looks at data sharing attitudes globally, and discusses the challenges that researchers face in sharing their data.

  •  This white paper proposes and discusses key ways to improve on research data sharing practices.

  •  A novel, quantitative and qualitative perspective on open science in Japan.

  • . This report summarises the findings of a survey with more than 2,000 researchers, looking at the challenges and opportunities for data sharing in China.

Why openly share research data?

Community involvement

We work with the scientific community in a variety of ways to improve data management and publication. We also support a number of education and best practice initiatives.

Henning Schoenenberger, Standards and Technology Executive Committee (STEC) 

Graham Smith, Research Data Implementation Group


Graham Smith, Working group co-chair (FAIRsharing Registry: Connecting data policies, standards and databases RDA working group)

Tristan Matthews, Board member

Graham Smith, International Data Policy Committee

Graham Smith, Ethics and Research Integrity Policy Working Group (ERIP)

Graham Smith, WG3, Open science monitoring with scholarly content providers

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