SHAring Rewards and Credit (SHARC) Interest Group session, International Data Week, Gabarone, Botswana, 8 November 2018
Creators: name: Bezuidenhout, Louise
name: Kasule, Mary
name: Lotter, Lucia
name: Murphy, Fiona
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018
Subjects: Data sharing; research credit; open science; open data

description: <strong>Towards recommendations for crediting the sharing in Research: addressing challenges within African academic infrastructures.</strong>

Despite numerous statements and an active promotion in some countries or institutions, data &amp; materials sharing according to the FAIR principles is still not the practice in most communities. This is even more the case for the sharing of materials such as physical samples. Various obstacles have been identified and discussed in the literature. Some of them are cross-scientific communities over countries, some are more specific. Our group focuses on a major obstacle, the lack of recognition for the efforts required, to make the resources available and reusable, and works to provide recommendations that would take into account as much as possible challenges within existing academic infrastructures to resolve these difficulties. 

The group’s activity has moved forward on two fronts to date. 1/ Describing the landscape of the crediting and rewarding processes regarding the sharing activity in different scientific communities (biomedical and life sciences, biodiversity, geospatial domains mainly so far) to identify gaps, both domain-specific and transversal. 2/ Drafting recommendations accordingly that will be elaborated, disseminated and presented to relevant stakeholders at national and international levels, to establish improved guidance for resource sharing and its recognition in research practices.

<strong>Meeting objectives</strong>

1) To focus on sharing related concerns specific to African scientific communities; 

2) To gain specific insights into the challenges facing Academic scientists interested in sharing research resources

3) To get feedback and input from scientists from those communities and networks interested in the SHARC objectives of regarding actionable interventions to enhance the recognition of sharing activities as important research ouputs

4) To come up with concrete actions to support resource sharing that could be implemented within African research contexts

Further questions:

How do we incentivise data sharing in situations where individuals have invested their own money into their research? What is the empirical evidence around the benefits that accrue to researchers when they share their data? Will research partnerships and co-authorship be acceptable conditions for obtaining access to secondary data? Recognizing the marked differences in the research settings in Africa (political, legal and ethical, physical, social and economic etc.) which all have a bearing on incentivizing data sharing, to what level can the research community harmonize policies that govern fair data sharing and incentivizing / rewarding in Africa? How best can the research community with a longer experience in the area of data sharing help to develop training programmes to educate research stakeholders in Africa about fair data sharing and incentivizing data sharing practices, at all levels (individual, institutional, continental)? What knowledge, insights, and practices around sharing/re-use are already in place in Africa that could be usefully amplified to other research communities?