Factors for Enabling Sharing and Reuse of Research Data

Many agents, strategies and techniques have to work together to maintain digital information accessible and usable over the long term. This study focuses on the processes that enable sharing and reuse of research data in the academic environment and sheds light on three important actors in the whole process: data creators, repositories and downstream users. The contents in a repository are highly heterogeneous. There are different content types and formats, licenses and terms of use. For reuse, research data need to be interoperable on a technical, semantic and legal level. Thus, future shareability involves format, software, documentation, considerations on ethics and confidentiality, consents, future rights management and licensing, and an infrastructure for sharing. Repositories combine people, processes and technologies which together facilitate making data usable and reusable. They protect rights of data providers and enable appropriate access for reusers. For researchers, they are a familiar way to facilitate open access. The repository management needs to make other repositories and applications integrated and interoperable, and enable high standards of accessibility. They also need to make systems compliant with funders’ requirements. Downstream users expect different levels of access and as few restrictions as possible. They want the maximum freedom to use the latest tools and services to make the best use of the information to which they have access.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/at/legalcod