Public sharing of research datasets: a pilot study of associations

The public sharing of primary research datasets potentially benefits the research community but is not yet common practice. In this pilot study, we analyzed whether data sharing frequency was associated with funder and publisher requirements, journal impact factor, or investigator experience and impact. Across 397 recent biomedical microarray studies, we found investigators were more likely to publicly share their raw dataset when their study was published in a high-impact journal and when the first or last authors had high levels of career experience and impact. We estimate the USA’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) data sharing policy applied to 19% of the studies in our cohort; being subject to the NIH data sharing plan requirement was not found to correlate with increased data sharing behavior in multivariate logistic regression analysis. Studies published in journals that required a database submission accession number as a condition of publication were more likely to share their data, but this trend was not statistically significant. These early results will inform our ongoing larger analysis, and hopefully contribute to the development of more effective data sharing initiatives.