Aims

The aim of this chapter is to prompt you to think about strategies to influence researchers to see the importance of RDM to themselves.

Introduction

Many international and national bodies governing research have expressed their commitment to the ideal of open data. For all the qualifications, this is the ideal put forward by the UK Concordat on Open Research Data discussed in Chapter 5, for example. Yet data could be shared in a number of ways, many of which may be more familiar to researchers than open unrestricted sharing in a data repository, for example:

There are some compelling reasons why most research data could be potentially shared in these different ways and much of it openly. This section considers some of those reasons.

You will recall from Chapter 4 that the soil scientist professor Steve Banwart said a lot about sharing within a specific project. Other RDMRose interviewees talked about data sharing:

Richard Rowe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield.