Blog

David Carr, Programme Manager for Open Research at Wellcome, introduces a new pilot initiative with Springer Nature to help Wellcome funded researchers make their data more discoverable and useable.

Wellcome is committed to ensuring that the outputs generated by the research we support – including research papers, datasets, software and materials – are managed, preserved and shared in ways that will maximise the ultimate benefit of that research to health and society. Our policy on managing and sharing data, software and materials, which was updated last July makes clear that we expect our funded researchers to maximise the availability of their research outputs with as few restrictions as possible.

Actively supporting Wellcome researchers in sharing their underlying data and code and making it more useable by others.

In updating this policy, we made explicit a core requirement that data and original software underlying research publications must be made available to other researchers at the time of publication. Opening up these data and software to other researchers allows published claims to be scrutinised and reproduced, and enables these outputs to be accessed, combined and used to potentially generate new insights and discoveries.

From the outset, Wellcome Open Research has embraced this philosophy and has worked to actively support Wellcome researchers in sharing their underlying data and code and making it more useable by others. This has included requiring data availability statements and introducing new innovations – including interactive figures and Code Ocean widget integration, as well as providing ongoing advice and assistance to authors.

The Research Data Support Service pilot

Since last year, the publisher Springer Nature has offered a Research Data Support service to researchers. This is an optional service, through which an in-house team of specialist data editors and curators will review a dataset associated with a publication and help to enhance the associated metadata, assign persistent identifiers, produce a description of the data, and assist researchers in depositing the data. Advice on suitable community repositories is provided, and data is made available via the Springer Nature figshare repository where no such repository is available.

Available to any researcher who wished to share data associated with a peer-reviewed scholarly work

Following a successful pilot phase, the service was expanded in January 2018 to make it available to any researcher who wished to share data associated with a peer-reviewed scholarly work (including papers, books and conference proceedings), whether published by Springer Nature or by another publisher.

Given our commitment to supporting our researchers in sharing data and code underlying publications, Wellcome was keen to test whether this type of service could add value – both in terms of helping researchers to meet funder requirements and in making the data more discoverable and useable.

Wellcome has therefore initiated a pilot with Springer Nature to offer the Research Data Support service to our funded researchers. We are supporting costs associated with the service for an initial fixed number of datasets, and these will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. A dataset can include a wide range of files supporting a publication of up to 50 gigabytes in total combined size.

The broad scope of the pilot means that any previously unpublished files that have been generated as part of research, other than the research paper or manuscript, can be submitted to Research Data Support. And, qualifying researchers can utilise Research Data Support to share data that support any Wellcome-funded study being published in any peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers publishing in Wellcome Open Research will shortly be able to take up the option to access the Research Data Support service directly through the submission system.  In the meantime, please contact the Wellcome Open Research team if you have any questions or would like to make use of the Service for data associated with a WOR article. The team will of course continue to provide advice and support to all authors, whether they opt to make use of the service or not.

We anticipate that this pilot will run for around six months, after which time we will review the experiences of researchers who made use of the service, and the extent to which the associated outputs were accessed and used. We hope it will help to inform our thinking on the role and added value Services of this type provide and our future approach for supporting researchers in sharing underlying data and code.