The state of open data

In 2017, Figshare released the results of its global survey of over 2000 researchers in a report that assesses the global landscape around open data and sharing practices. The report highlights the extent of awareness around open data, the incentives around its use, and perspectives researchers have about making their own research data open. For this year’s survey, partnering with both Springer Nature and Wiley, there was a marked growth in respondents from just over 2000 to almost 2300.

• - Respondents have become more aware of open data sets (82% up from 73%) than in 2016


• - Age does not appear to be a major factor in this trend


• - 74% of researchers are curating their data for sharing


• - Willingness of researchers to reuse open data sets in their own research has grown, a 10% increase to 80%, with the increase replicated across age groups


• - Researchers who routinely share their data has also grown since 2016, although by a smaller amount, from 57% to 60%


• - The proportion of researchers who have never made a data set openly available has reduced in the last year


• - Looking deeper we can see further promise for the future of open data, as 70% of these researchers are now willing to reuse open data sets in their own research (up from 65%)

In an effort to promote data reuse figshare partnered with researchers at Oxford University to create interactive data visualisations.
The Shiny app pulls the data direct from the item on figshare.com and plots graphs in the browser allowing researchers to dive into the data and create charts within the browser.

Download the State of Open Data Report
Download the underlying survey data
Download the Shinyapp code