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The life-changing magic of sharing your data

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 312–315 (2019)Cite this article

The benefits of data sharing to the scientific community are widely agreed upon. But does data sharing also benefit individual scientists? I argue that data sharing may carry tangible benefits to one’s own research that can outweigh any potential associated costs.

It is increasingly expected that scientists not only publish results from their research but also freely share the raw data and analysis pipelines leading to those results. Data sharing is widely considered beneficial by other scientists, journals, funding agencies and by society as a whole.

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Fig. 1: Increasing propensity to share data among psychology researchers at eight UK universities.
Fig. 2: Motivations and concerns when sharing data among psychology researchers at eight UK universities.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Laurence T. Hunt

  2. Max Planck-UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, UK

    Laurence T. Hunt

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  1. Laurence T. Hunt
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Correspondence to Laurence T. Hunt.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Summary of survey data; Survey on Data Sharing screenshots; and Answers to free text survey questions.

Supplementary Data

ZIP file containing raw anonymised survey data and analysis scripts, and further details of survey.

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SI guide explaining file identity for ZIP file.

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Hunt, L.T. The life-changing magic of sharing your data. Nat Hum Behav 3, 312–315 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0560-3

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