Interests of Others in Your Own Research Data

The amount of data available to researchers is maximised through the use of Open Data. Scientific insights can be established on this and new discoveries can be accelerated. If other researchers can use your research data, this could help to achieve a scientific breakthrough. No-one knows in advance which (perhaps also coincidental) combination of datasets will produce a breakthrough. This means it may well be the case that your research data are also of interest for completely different research contexts that you cannot even imagine today.

A further advantage of the common use of data is that the verifiability of the research is promoted, because if you make your data publicly available, others can try to reproduce or replicate your research results. Other data of yours can help to check the resilience of your results. This means that new insights can be validated and ways to increase experiments for follow-up research can be suggested.

Tip

Worksheet 9 “Talking about research data“ from the worksheet series of the Open Science Magazine of the ZBW.