Researchers struggle to make their data reusable

The main obstacle to sharing research data is the difficulty of organising it in a way that makes it useful to others, a survey has found.

Forty-six per cent of more than 4,000 respondents to a question on the problems of data sharing flagged organisational difficulties as a obstacle, in a survey conducted by the scientific publisher Springer Nature. This was a higher proportion than for any other problem raised in the survey, which was published on 21 March.

Uncertainties about copyright and licensing were flagged as an obstacle by 37 per cent of respondents, a lack of knowledge about data repositories by 33 per cent, a lack of time by 25 per cent and costs by 19 per cent.