Launching a policy and studying the data collected from it may also be valuable: it can create insights into how to enable and support better experiences for researchers, more data sharing, and higher-quality data sharing. For example, with data from this study we could compute which kinds of articles without shared data are similar to those with shared data, and to which journals both are submitted. With that information we could design and launch supportive policies and services where they are, in theory at least, most likely to be welcomed by researchers, and therefore where they are most likely to have a positive impact. Perhaps this is what our open data challenge becomes at publishers like Wiley: to present researchers with relevant and easy options that help them to share new research data, and that help them to make an impact with it.
It is ironic to write an article about data availability while sharing not the data set. The data availability statements we analysed were submitted by researchers to Wiley as part of journal articles, some of which we published. We analysed this information to improve our understanding of researchers' practices. We'll use what we've learned to improve our products and services so that we can better serve – and even delight – researchers who choose to publish their research with Wiley. That kind of use is, for articles we publish, covered by the license researchers give us to publish their work or, for articles submitted to but not eventually published by Wiley, by our privacy policy. But we did not ask those researchers when they submitted their articles whether we could share data about their data availability statements, and so somewhat ironically we find ourselves unsure about whether we have the right to share our data set alongside this article. We chose not to because of this uncertainty. With that in mind, the final and perhaps most important lesson for us from this study is an appreciation for the value of careful study designs and data management plans, created before starting a study. We salute you, open researchers, you're doing amazing things.
Data availability statement
Research data are not shared.
Disclosure of conflicts of interest
All authors are employed by Wiley and benefit from the company's success.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to our colleague Elisha Morris at Wiley for the literature search and analysis we used to write our introduction. Thanks to our colleague Yan Wu at Wiley for insights into data sharing requirements in China. Written collaboratively and preprinted using Authorea; thanks to Alberto Pepe and the Authorea team.