Whitepaper: Practical challenges for researchers in data sharing: Review

Key points Springer Nature's white paper seeks to determine the main obstacles for data sharing and looks at how discipline, region, and seniority impact data sharing. The greatest issue around data sharing is organizing the data in a useful way. The amount of data sharing varies widely within the sciences, with biology researchers sharing the most and physical sciences sharing the least. Asian researchers share their data the most while Australasians share the least. The white paper underestimates the importance of attitudes when assessing the obstacles. The report does not include a statistical analysis to confirm whether the observed trends were significant. © 2018 The Author(s). Learned Publishing © 2018 ALPSP.