We need more carrots: give academic researchers the support and incentives to share data

Making data available for other researchers to find, use, reuse, and reproduce is fundamental to open science, and ultimately makes research more efficient and effective. Yet despite funder policies that encourage and require data sharing, researchers in both the UK and the US report lower percentages of data sharing than the global average. In addition to progressive policies, Grace Baynes suggests researchers should be given incentives, expert support, training, and the infrastructure to make it seamless and easy to share data, and worth their while. Governments, funders, research institutions, libraries, and publishers all have a role to play to unlock the huge potential of research data.