Code and data-sharing practices fall short

The computer codes that researchers use in their work and the raw data they generate are still often not made available to others, a workshop on open science has heard.

Policymakers have a blind spot when it comes to code and data sharing, David Osimo, research director at the Lisbon Council think tank, told the event in Ghent, Belgium on 27 May. A big problem is a basic lack of information on what the community is doing in this space.

“These are areas where there is a huge gap that needs to be filled,” he said. Policymakers need to recognise that data sharing is “costly, time-consuming and actually also boring”.