Why share data?
Food security and sustainable agriculture are among the most pressing global issues of today. Faced with a growing global population likely to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, increasing uncertainty, climate change, land and soil degradation, and food waste, the agriculture sector is under immense pressure to come up with new solutions to complex challenges.
Open access to research and open publication of research data are vital resources to help achieve food and nutrition security. The publication of timely and accurate data can promote more effective decision making, foster innovation and drive organisational change through greater transparency with benefits for farmers, researchers, extension experts, policy makers, governments, and other private sector and civil society stakeholders.
Donors and implementing research partners are already beginning to realise the benefits of publishing open data to the agriculture sector, and to their own organisation.
CABI has done research on the evidence of use and benefits of open research. Uses included measuring the reach of activities; accessing results from other organisations to feed into new research; accessing openly available code and tutorials for capacity building; replicating earlier studies and using existing datasets to inform long-term follow-up studies (5, 10 or 15 years after the original data was collected); and challenging the existing evidence base. Reported benefits included improving the speed, efficiency and efficacy of research, triangulation and comparison with multiple sources of data to validate findings; ensuring the reproducibility of results; allowing researchers to extend the analysis of earlier studies or conduct a meta-analysis; creating transparency around farmer organisations; and providing more opportunities to smaller, less well funded research teams to access valuable data.
A number of implementing research partners similarly reported flow-on benefits in changed behaviour. Being compelled to publish open data under the donor policy promotes more collaboration between implementing research partners and the wider agriculture research community. The result is an expanded pool of projects and organisations that want to join and share data. Researchers know more about what experiments are being performed elsewhere, can analyse historical data that was previously unavailable, and pass on the same benefit to others.
Open access to research and open publication of research data are vital resources to help achieve food and nutrition security. The publication of timely and accurate data can promote more effective decision making, foster innovation and drive organisational change through greater transparency with benefits for farmers, researchers, extension experts, policy makers, governments, and other private sector and civil society stakeholders.
Donors and implementing research partners are already beginning to realise the benefits of publishing open data to the agriculture sector, and to their own organisation.
CABI has done research on the evidence of use and benefits of open research. Uses included measuring the reach of activities; accessing results from other organisations to feed into new research; accessing openly available code and tutorials for capacity building; replicating earlier studies and using existing datasets to inform long-term follow-up studies (5, 10 or 15 years after the original data was collected); and challenging the existing evidence base. Reported benefits included improving the speed, efficiency and efficacy of research, triangulation and comparison with multiple sources of data to validate findings; ensuring the reproducibility of results; allowing researchers to extend the analysis of earlier studies or conduct a meta-analysis; creating transparency around farmer organisations; and providing more opportunities to smaller, less well funded research teams to access valuable data.
A number of implementing research partners similarly reported flow-on benefits in changed behaviour. Being compelled to publish open data under the donor policy promotes more collaboration between implementing research partners and the wider agriculture research community. The result is an expanded pool of projects and organisations that want to join and share data. Researchers know more about what experiments are being performed elsewhere, can analyse historical data that was previously unavailable, and pass on the same benefit to others.
What do other researchers say?
“Much more progress comes when we share our data…sharing how I’ve done things helps others to learn from my mistakes and gets them ‘up to speed’ faster. No single person has ALL the knowledge or all the time anymore. So the largest benefit is enabling more people to contribute.”
“In breeding communities such as cassava, [open data] provides a huge impetus for other researchers to join and be part of the community. It also prevents useless repetition of experiments and better use of research dollars.”
Text adapted from:
Smith F, Fawcett J and Musker R. Donor open data policy and practice: an analysis of five agriculture programmes [version 1; not peer reviewed]. F1000Research 2017, 6:1900 (document) (https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1115013.1)
