Your obligation to share data

National Institutes of Health (NIH): The NIH expects final research data, especially unique data, from NIH-supported research to be made available to other researchers, as stated in the NIH Data Sharing Policy.

Scientists submitting grant, cooperative, or contract applications should include a data-sharing plan, or provide justification for the absence of such a plan, in a brief paragraph to be placed immediately after the Research Plan Section (i.e., immediately after PHS 398 Section I. Letters of Support in the Research Plan Section of their application) so it does not count toward the application page limit.

National Science Foundation (NSF): The NSF also expects the sharing of data, as stated in the "Sharing of Findings, Data and Other Research Products" section of the NSF Grant Proposal Guide.

[The NSF] expects PIs to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of the work.

How to make your data available

PRI can disseminate your data through the SodaPop system or help you prepare your data for deposit in another data archive, like ICPSR.

The Data Sharing for Demographic Research project has developed an excellent guide to take you through the process. Whether you are collecting original data or have added value to existing data, consult the Data Sharing for Demographic Research project's Data Producers resources for an excellent guide to making your data available.

Sample data sharing plans for public and restricted data

Data will be distributed through the Population Research Institute's SodaPop (Simple Online Data Archive for Population Studies). The system provides online data extraction, access to machine-readable codebooks and documentation, bibliographic citation, and cataloging by the Penn State University Libraries. Researchers may request the data as a delimited-ascii, Stata, SPSS, or SAS file. Variable search capability will be provided. A public-access version of the data will be released x months after completion of the data collection. PRI staff will conduct a formal disclosure analysis to assess potential confidentiality risks in data and devise ways to protect the confidentiality of respondents while retaining maximum information in a data collection. The data will protect the identity of any human subjects in accordance with the Federal Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule, guidelines provided by the Pennsylvania State University's Responsible Conduct of Research Program and the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology's Checklist on Disclosure Potential of Proposed Data Releases.

[optional] A restricted version of the data will be released x months after data collection. The restricted version of the data will differ from the public release with the exclusion of xxx. Researchers requesting the restricted data will be required to submit a proposal and sign a data-use agreement.

[optional] Online, on-demand statistical analysis will enable exploration of the dataset prior to / in lieu of download.

Sample data sharing plan justifying the inability to release data

The proposed research will involve a small sample (less than 20 subjects) recruited from clinical facilities in the New York City area with Williams syndrome. This rare craniofacial disorder is associated with distinguishing facial features, as well as mental retardation. Even with the removal of all identifiers, we believe that it would be difficult if not impossible to protect the identities of subjects given the physical characteristics of subjects, the type of clinical data (including imaging) that we will be collecting, and the relatively restricted area from which we are recruiting subjects. Therefore, we are not planning to share the data.

For more examples see: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm#ex