Will you be forced to share your data?

Funding agencies ponder new policies that call for grantees to archive and share their research data.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

Few researchers would deny that, in general, sharing research data with colleagues is the best way to move research forward. But when actually asked to yield their data, many become wary.

Psychologists are particularly reluctant to share research data, say experts in the field. Although psychologists are bound by the ethical guidelines of APA and other professional organizations to hand over data to any colleagues who make reasonable requests, psychologists have not made it a custom to pool resources.

They will need to re-examine that tradition over the next several years. Most everyone who follows science policy agrees that as technology makes data sharing more feasible, funding agencies will require researchers to comply with data-sharing requests and to put their federally funded research results into public archives, which would be available to scientists and, in some cases, to the public.

"The train is leaving the station," says Wendy Baldwin, PhD, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And psychologists need to decide whether they will ride in first class by helping to shape data sharing policies or in the baggage compartment, having had little say in how they got on the train, she says.

The issues surrounding data sharing--including what types of data should be made available and when researchers would have to hand them over for archiving--are so thorny that an NIH effort to draft a policy on the issue has been stalled for months amidst cross-disciplinary disagreements.

Not that NIH or any other funding agency would force everyone to share all data. Some experiments and studies are not suitable for sharing. Small, experimental studies, for example, are easy enough to replicate without data sharing. And some other kinds, such as child development studies that videotape participants, may be too difficult to release without risking violations of participants' privacy.

But many funding agencies have begun financing large, expensive longitudinal studies on issues such as the long-term effects of day care, which use up a large chunk of scarce resources. And it's on these unique data sets that funding agencies have already begun to enforce data sharing policies.

Some researchers hail the trend as good for science.

"Data should be available to scrutiny and for reuse by other people," says Alice Eagly, PhD, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former chair of APA's Board of Scientific Affairs. "It would make for better science and allow us to think of our work as being more cumulative and built upon."

Although others agree with the basic tenet of data sharing, they worry that forced archiving and sharing will result in data being used inappropriately.

Researchers have to earn the right to collect and analyze data by winning grants through a competitive process, says psychologist John Graham, PhD, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Center for the Study of Prevention through Innovative Methodology at Pennsylvania State University. To have someone else come along "like a carpetbagger" and use the data without oversight of the original researcher is unfair and inappropriate, he says.

Certainly, data sharing policies should proceed with caution and ensure that researchers have a reasonable period of exclusive use of their data, say funding agency administrators. But the question should not be whether data will be shared, but how and when. And, in some cases, agencies will force investigators to share their data, says Enoch Gordis, MD, director of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

"We'd all love it if we didn't need laws that prohibit things like robbery," says Gordis. "But people don't always act the way we'd like and there are some very distinguished researchers who have been very bad about sharing."

The virtues of sharing

David Johnson, PhD, director of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences agrees.

"There needs to be an evolution in thinking by psychologists about what it takes to build a reliable body of knowledge in an area," he says. "If people are willing to only share results and not data, they will never have a great way of checking new results against previous results."

Sharing data also increases the amount of reliable data available on any scientific question, says University of Virginia psychologist and methodologist Jack McArdle, PhD, who chairs the Evaluation Advisory Committee of the NIH Center for Scientific Review.

"The inferences people and scientists alike often want to make are nationwide," he says. "So we have to be more careful about the representativeness and kinds of people we measure. For the behavioral sciences to move forward in terms of meeting our national needs, we must emphasize the use of large and representative samples that can only be collected through multiple large data bases, which can then be shared by all scientists."

It's this large-scale data that funding agencies are pushing researchers to archive and share first. For example, by next year the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), will provide public Internet access to its massive multisite longitudinal study of childcare.

"Scientifically, it's the right thing to do," says NICHD Director Duane Alexander, MD. By the time the material is made public, he notes, NICHD investigators will have had several years to analyze the data as a group and another year for individual investigators to perform their own analyses. It was a matter of balancing their right to a period of exclusive use, he says, with the rights of the broader scientific community and taxpayers who funded the study to see this unique resource.

Many NIH institutes have also begun requiring genetic researchers to deposit their data into archives accessible by other researchers. Some fear that this will allow mavericks to analyze data collected by someone else, and take credit for all the work. NIH institutes have tried to give the original researchers room to maneuver. NIMH, for one, allows researchers to set their own time limits in data sharing plans submitted with their grant applications.

"Protection of the investigators is not simply a moral obligation--it's a public health question," says Enoch Gordis, MD, director of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

"If researchers have no incentive to do the hard work up front, in the future they won't do these studies. Data sharing is an important mandate--but we don't want to turn off the spigot [of good researchers]."

Rules are coming

How to protect researchers while also providing the widest possible access to federally funded data are the issues NIH and other funding agencies are struggling with as they try to formulate data-sharing policies.

Most of the policies on the table would take data out of the control of the researchers who collected them and put them into a public archive to be accessed either exclusively by researchers--as is done with genetics data--or by anyone who's interested--as will happen with the NICHD day-care study data.

Some researchers chafe at the idea. For data sharing to truly work, it's better if it's done as a collaboration between the original researchers--the data "owners"--and the researchers borrowing the data.

"We don't want to get going on [data sharing] unless it's seen as win-win by both parties," says Penn State's Graham, who both borrows and shares data in his own work on drug abuse. "By building something together, everyone will be more productive. If you wrest it away--if there's a hostile takeover of the data set--it won't work."

While funding agency administrators tend to agree that researchers should be given as much control as possible over their data, they note that taxpayers actually own research funded by the federal government. Others believe fears over data misuse or misinterpretation are misguided. For one thing, notes Ronald Abeles, PhD, special assistant to the director of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, the original investigator is not responsible for shoddy work by a secondary investigator. Poor research by secondary analysts will hurt their reputation and not that of the original investigator.

Dialogue over these issues is critical, says NIH's Baldwin, because data sharing policies are inevitable as the federal government pushes its agencies to open themselves up to public scrutiny. The hope is that the funding agencies will be able to formulate their own policies that keep the needs of researchers in mind.



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