“Over the past several decades, US federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have made substantial investments in building an infrastructure to support open sharing of research data among researchers. These investments have funded the creation of a host of platforms and tools, among the most important of which are the decentralized network of domain and generalist repositories available to researchers. The technical infrastructure necessary for widespread deposit and reuse of data is now relatively mature.

Researchers’ behaviors, however, have lagged behind. In many fields, data sharing is still more of an ideal than a reality. Indeed, recent results from a national survey of faculty conducted by Ithaka S+R

 indicate that while two out of three faculty in scientific and medical fields believe that depositing research data in public repositories is important, just 40 percent of scientists and half of faculty in medical fields report that they often or occasionally share research data….

Since 2019, Ithaka S+R has also been tracking a third incentive through case studies of what we have called “data communities.” Data communities are fluid networks of scientists who voluntarily exchange and reuse data across disciplinary boundaries to advance shared or complementary research goals. Examples of data communities include: FlyBase, the Cambridge Structural Database and ZooArchNet….”