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Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?

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Comments from researchers and colleagues have indicated some disquiet about the Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence in some areas of the academic community. However, in conversation with some legal people and contemporaries at other institutions (some of these exchanges are replicated at the end of the blog) one of the observations was that generally academics are not necessarily cognizant with what the licences offer and indeed what protections are available under regular copyright.

To try and determine whether this was an education and advocacy problem or if there are real issues we had a roundtable discussion on 29 February at Cambridge University attended by about 35 people who were a mixture of academics, administrators, publishers and legal practitioners. The discussion centred on some of the objections raised in the information circulated before the meeting (which is summarised at the end of this blog). For ease of description each objection is addressed in turn.

Background

Creative Commons provide a series of licences that people who create work can add to their work which tell users what they can or cannot do with it. There are a range of licenses that run from no restrictions at all CC-0 to fairly restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND-SA* where the user must attribute the author, not amend the work, cannot make any financial gain from it and must put the same licence on anything they produce using this work.

There are increasing requirements from funders such as the Wellcome Trust and RCUK in the UK that any work published open access must have a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence attached to it. The rationale behind this is that research needs to be available for other researchers to both read and reuse, but also to text and data mine without fear of copyright breaches. Work that is available under a CC-BY licence can be easily incorporated into course reading lists without copyright complications.

* Note added 8 March – a comment has been sent through is that the CC-BY-NC-ND-SA is impossible to apply because the share-alike and no derivatives clauses are mutually exclusive and cannot be applied together. See this explanation.

Summary of the discussion

The general feeling in the discussions was that academics do want to share their work but they don’t want things to be used incorrectly. The outcome of the discussion was that while there are some confusions in this area, and we could do some work on advocacy and educational materials there are also some specific cases where CC-BY has the potential to cause issues.  In a small number of cases issues have actually occurred.

Is CC-BY a problem? For whom?

We should note here that CC-BY only affects a proportion of research published in the UK. While all research is potentially affected by the HEFCE requirement to make work available, the route preferred is through placing a copy in a repository. So this discussion affects only those researchers who have a specific grant from the Charities Open Access Fund (Wellcome Trust) or the RCUK. Humanities researchers tend not to hold grants, and for those that do, it is their articles, not their monographs that are affected by this requirement.

While there are some actual concrete examples of issues for researchers in the Arts and Humanities, many of the problems discussed here are what could happen. There was a comment from a scientific publisher that the sciences also had some concerns about CC-BY when it was first introduced, but none of the concerns have actually come to fruition. Another person noted there have been hundreds of thousands of pieces of content published under CC-BY licences, with very few known problem cases or harm. This is telling. The question was raised: Are we just repeating myths?

On the other hand, just because issues haven’t happened yet does not mean that it would not be a serious problem should they did occur. One of the questions at the end of the discussion was: “Are the ethical norms of society strong enough to stop these concerns happening?” It would appear that to date they have been in the sciences.

Moral rights

CC-BY is an attribution licence. This means the moral right for the originator of the work to be identified is retained. However the moral right for the integrity of the research is not protected. The discussion centred around this.

If someone uses work under a CC-BY licence and makes alterations to it, they do need to indicate they have changed a work but not how they have altered it. The concern in the group was that the work could be altered so the meaning is entirely changed and it would still be attributed to the original author.

Authors can object to the derogatory treatment of their work. The recourse of being able to ask to have the originator’s name taken off the work was not seen as satisfactory because then the person who has adapted the work is potentially able to publish the work, which is based substantially on someone else’s work, as their own.

That said, one comment was that academic works are always open to interpretation, whether quoted or not and whether available under a CC-BY licence or not.

Translation

The area of translations does appear to have some concrete examples of problems caused by CC-BY for Humanities & Social Science authors. One of the issues is it is very difficult to check a translation unless the original author can read the language into which their work has been translated.

Plagiarism

Of all of the areas of discussion, plagiarism raised the most opinions. The accusation that CC-BY somehow ‘encourages’ plagiarism is often levelled. Some arguments are that making work available under a Creative Commons licence protect authors against plagiarism rather than encourage it. Works available in the public domain are far more easily identified as the original work than something published on paper and held on a library shelf, for example.

There was a debate about what actually constitutes plagiarism. One opinion was that ‘It’s plagiarism unless it’s in quotes’. However while the use of quote marks would protect the integrity of the work, there is nothing legally wrong with a derivative use of a work that is available under CC-BY – legally this is not plagiarism.

Nothing about the CC-BY licence overrides UK law about fair dealing. One of the lawyers present noted that academics don’t understand the details of copyright. Academics want full protection but also full sharing. In the world of the internet there’s a free-for-all – people copy-and-paste from wherever they want. No-one respects licences, so an academic work is not necessarily protected under current rules.

It was noted that plagiarism occurs all the time, even when articles are all rights reserved and under traditional copyright. And while Open Access publishing does make plagiarism easier (regardless of the licence), it doesn’t change the underlying principle that it’s unethical. Ethical behaviour in academia sits separately from copyright law.

Sensitive information

The area of sensitive information seems to have the strongest case for not using a CC-BY licence. Researchers working in areas that might contain sensitive information – such as medical or criminal areas – spend a great deal of time ensuring that their findings are presented sensitively and ensuring their distribution is appropriate. The concern with CC-BY licences mean that these findings can be misconstrued which would be damaging to the researcher and could go back to the participants and affect them. If presented in the wrong way, altered research outputs could affect not just their research but also participants.

There is an issue about the dialogue between the people that are being studied and if they have any moral rights about how the information is being used.

An example that was given was in anthropology, working with a community of Native Americans in northern California, who released sensitive data and stories from their cultural past which they want to be accessed. However because they have been exploited in the past they wanted some form of restriction on how these things can be reused. This is an example where a CC-BY licence would not be appropriate.

An oral historian discussed the type of work they do with subjects talking about traumatic periods of their life. In these cases the researcher enters in a covenant with them about how their work can be used. This would not be able to be dealt with ethically under a CC-BY licence. The issue is about subsequent control over reuse of research, with concern about it being co-opted and used in another context.

The question about ethical use of material was raised again, with someone noting that no matter what licence it is available under you can’t control what people do with your work if they disagree with you.

Items containing third party copyright

Being required to publish work under a CC-BY licence does cause problems for people whose work contains a large amount of 3rd party material. This is because the burden on the author to obtain permissions for all of the works would be both time consuming and expensive. May researchers have raised questions about whether they can even do their work if they’re required to publish under CC-BY.

That said, if researchers are themselves using CC-BY works this issue is mitigated because they automatically have permission to use the material. This raises the question; does CC-BY make it more difficult or easier?

Commercialisation

There were some examples raised where a series of works that were freely available had been packaged up and sold. This raised the question: Who is being harmed in commercial exploitation of academic works?

Academics do not publish in journals for money, so the originator of a work that is subsequently sold on is not personally losing a revenue stream. There was a distinction between the academic and non-academic publishing environment. It was agreed that the person buying these works are being scammed. The concern is that people are being exploited by being made to pay for things that should be freely available.

The discussion moved to whether a Non Commercial licence would solve this problem. The issue here is the confusion over the definition of ‘commercial’ in this context. An institution that has a revenue stream from student fees could be seen to be commercial and therefore unable to include CC-BY-NC items on their reading lists.

It was noted that CC-BY–NC-ND is extremely restrictive about ways works can be used.

Academic freedom

The discussion several times touched on the broader issue of the government putting an increasing number of requirements against researchers. The questions raised were: “Does someone who is fronting up with the money have the rights to enforce a particular licence? What about the subjects of a study?”

There is supposed to be arms length between funders and universities but a concern is that funding bodies want to have more power to tell academics what to work on.

Next steps

In summary, the discussion indicated that CC-BY licences do not encourage plagiarism, or issues with commercialism within academia (although there is a broader ethical issue). However in some cases CC-BY licences could pose problems for the moral integrity of the work and cause issues with translations. CC-BY licenses do create challenges for works containing sensitive information and for works containing third party copyright.

There is an expectation amongst the academic community that people behave ethically and within cultural norms.

As agreed with the group we have published this blog post which summarises the discussions held this week. In discussions about the Open Access Policy Framework for the University it would be helpful to include a statement that there is concern about CC-BY licences for some disciplines and types of research.

Background information sent to participants prior to the discussion

Commentary on CC-BY in published reports

The issue of the CC-BY licenses was a recurrent theme in A review of the RCUK review of implementation of its OA policy (March 2015). Many arts, humanities and social science disciplines hold ‘principled and practical objections to the use of CC-BY licences’ (p18). This is partly because work under a CC-BY license ‘could be both used commercially in ways of which the author does not approve and also might not be properly acknowledged as their work’ (pp19-20).

The Royal Historical Society evidence to the RCUK review noted that humanities scholars have particular objections to certain kinds of ‘derivative use’ that amount to the encouragement of plagiarism. Because the ‘attribution’ requirement in CC BY is very loose, it is possible for a reuser of a humanities article to alter it and reissue it under their own name, specifying only that it is an adaptation of the original, but without specifying how it has been adapted. In this way reusers may adopt the style, argument and ‘personality’ of the original work under their own name (and even copyright it). This represents a violation of the specific moral right of the author to the integrity of the work, and the only recourse offered to the author by CC BY is to have their name removed from the attribution (which makes the violation worse). This kind of re-use is as likely to degrade as to enhance the public benefit of the research.

The British Academy’s response to the Commons Select Committee (2013) noted that many articles in HSS subjects are the product of single-author scholarship, where there is more of a claim on ‘moral rights’ that are not adequately protected under an unrestricted CC-BY licence. There were also concerns about commercial reuse of work that contains third party copyright, involving complicated permissions. The response suggests that it should be possible to vary Creative Commons licences according to the usages and requirements of different subject areas – and that an ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs’ licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) may very often be more appropriate

Notes on an April 2013 Royal Historic Society position changing workshop on CC-BY and Humanities (chaired by Peter Mandler) noted that the editors of a number of history journals have suggested that the CC-BY licence facilitates and promotes commercial re-use and uses akin to plagiarism; that the licence therefore amounts to an infringement of authors’ moral and intellectual property rights; and that it is likely to damage the quality of education.

The HistoryUK Submission to the 2013 Business, Innovation and Skills Committee Enquiry on Open Access Publishing raised issues about the loss of protection of intellectual property, the dangers associated with allowing derivative works in sensitive areas of research, and the possible increased costs or embargos publishers may feel compensate for the transfer of a commercial asset to a third party.

Comments from researchers and administrators

In preparation for the round table, Danny Kingsley asked her community across the sector what kinds of objections different people in an administrative or library role had heard from researchers. These are summarised below.

English researcher at Cambridge – “I would prefer not to make my work, produced with the benefit of public funding, available in a form that would allow others to exploit it commercially, as the simple CC-BY licence does. My preference would be for the CC BY-NC-SA licence.”

Research Information Specialist – One question to ask here is whether traditional publishing models – such as signing over copyright itself – are really more beneficial to authors, and of course to weigh the risk of a negative CC experience against the benefits of positive ones.

Concerns raised in discussion with academics in the Humanities (reflected in two responses)

  1. A belief that CC BY encourages plagiarism
  2. That content licenced under CC BY is not monitored for copyright and other infringement to the same extent as more restrictive licences (a misguided belief that publishers actively monitor use and reuse of content I think)
  3. I have also heard the more vague concern about ideas being manipulated or twisted in some way and then re-published under the author’s name
  4. That encouraging reuse, especially derivatives, means the author has no control over what people do with the information (and therefore are associated with something that they would rather not be)

Advice provided on Creative Commons and licensing

Published 3 March 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley, with thanks to Dr Philip Boyes and Dr Joyce Heckman for their notes.

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In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK

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On Friday 22 January Cambridge University invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK came to the University to talk to our researchers.

The related blog ‘Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing‘ summarises the presentations Jamie and David gave. After this event, a group of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and from the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge were invited to ask questions about the Wellcome Trust data management and sharing policy and CRUK data sharing and preservation policy directly of David and Jamie.

This blog is a summary of the discussion, with questions thematically grouped. These questions will be added to the list of Frequently Asked Questions on the University’s Research Data Management Website.

In summary:

  • It is not recommended that researchers simply share a link and release the data when requested. Research data should be available, accessible and discoverable.
  • The first responsibility is to protect the study participants. The funders provide guidance documents on sharing of patient data. Ethics committees also provide advice and guidance on what data can be shared. In principle, patient data should be safeguarded, but this should not preclude sharing. There are models for managed access to data that allow personal/sensitive data to be shared for legitimate purposes in a safe and secure manner.
  • The funders do not want to prevent new collaborations. When sharing data they recommend data generators provide a statement in the description of the data that they are willing to collaborate
  • It is recognised that it is often appropriate for researchers to have a defined period of exclusive access to the data they generate, but this should be determined by disciplinary norms. Any exemptions or delays have to be justified on a case by case basis, ideally at the outset of the project.
  • The funders expect research data that supports publications to be made accessible and publications should have a clear statement explaining how to access the underlying research data.
  • However researchers need to decide what is useful to be shared considering the effort of preparing the data for deposit and of sharing the data. If nobody is going to use the data, sharing is not a good use of researcher’s time.
  • Discipline-specific data repositories, where these exist, are recommended preferentially over general purpose or institutional repositories
  • Biosharing is an excellent resource with references to discipline-specific metadata schemas.
  • Staff members whose role is to manage data is an eligible cost on a grant
  • There are no funds for sharing data from old projects, although there are exceptions on a case by case basis
  • The funders are considering monitoring data management plans but their current primary goal is to encourage people to think about data management and sharing from the very start of the project

Access to research data

Q: Are funders benefiting from the expertise of organisations such as UK Data Service when providing advice on data access? UK Data Service has been managing controlled access to research data for a long time and it would be advantageous to benefit from their expertise.

A: Yes, we are in discussion with the UK Data Service. We are also working with the UK Data Service to consider whether it might be appropriate for hosting data from other disciplines beyond social science. We also believe there is significant scope to share lessons and best practices for data sharing between the social and biomedical sciences.

Q: Could we just share research data only when asked for it?

A: This is not a recommended solution: research data should be available, accessible and discoverable. Data access controls and criteria for what needs to happen for the access to be granted have to be made clear in metadata description.

Q: I have patient data which has to be stored in a secure space. I always say in my data management plan that I cannot share my data. I would like to get ethical guidance which will explain to me how to share these data. It is very easy to say that data cannot be shared. I would like to share my data, but I would like to do it properly. With patient data it is extremely difficult, especially with genomics data, where there is a risk that patients can be identified.

A: Sharing of clinical data is not easy. Both Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK are helping to drive a great deal of work which is considering access and governance models through which sensitive patient data can be made available for research in a safe, secure and trusted manner. They provide guidance documents on sharing of patient data. Safety of patients and patients’ data is important. Ethics committees also provide advice and guidance on what data can be shared.

Q: What about sharing of physical materials? I have received a request to share a culture derived from a patient material, but the Ethics Committee did not approve sharing of this material. What shall I do?

A (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): If your ethical approval says that you cannot share that material, you cannot share it. Your first responsibility is to protect your study participants.

Q: If I share my data via a repository and people can simply download my data, I can no longer collaborate with them to work on the data and I have lost the possibility of getting credit for my data.

A: Nobody wants to prevent new collaborations from happening. A solution might be to add a statement that you are willing to collaborate in the description of your data. Your data requestor might be interested in collaborating, simply because you know your data the best. Funders also expect that the data re-used by others is appropriately acknowledged/cited, and they want to ensure that due credit results from the secondary use of data.

Quality control of research data

Q: If researchers start sharing unpublished research data via data repositories there is a risk that these data will not be of good quality as they will not be peer-reviewed.

A: Authors of unpublished data can simply state in the data description that the item was not peer-reviewed. If applicable, funders also encourage reciprocal links between publications and supporting research data.

What data needs to be shared and when?

Q: If researchers start to share everything there will be a lot of useless data available in data repositories. How to prevent a flood of useless data on the internet?

A: We would like researchers to decide what data is useful to be shared. If nobody is likely to use the data, sharing is not a good use of researcher’s time. Repositories also need to make decisions over what is worth keeping over time.

Comment (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): The Research Council UK focuses on research data supporting publications and this is what we recommend to researchers: share research data which underpins publications.

Q: Are we expected to share large datasets resulting from bigger projects (databases, long-term datasets) or data supporting individual publications?

A: We expect research data that supports individual publications to be made available with a hyperlink to the data. We also want researchers to consider and plan more broadly how they can make data assets of value resulting from our funded research available to others in a timely and appropriate manner.

Q: What about images? Is it useful to share them? It involves a lot of time to organise images. Besides, a single confocal picture with multiple layers is 1GB. In theory it is possible to share all raw data and all raw images, but who would want to look at them? 10 figures of 10 images is already 100 GB of data. Where would I store all these images, who is going to use these data and how am I going to pay for this?

A: The effort of preparing the data for deposit and of sharing the data should be proportionate to the potential benefits of data sharing. Researchers need to decide what is useful to be shared, following disciplinary best practices and norms (recognising that disciplines are in very different places in terms of defining these).

Q: Is there a set amount of time for exclusive use of research data?

A: Researchers should adhere to disciplinary norms. For example, in genomics research data is frequently shared before publication (sometimes under a publication moratorium which protects the data generator’s right to first publication). Any exemptions or delays have to be justified on a case by case basis.

Comment (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): Research is competitive. Sometimes it might be useful for researchers to know who wants to get the access to data and what do they need them for.

Cost of data sharing

Q: Can I ask in my grant for a staff member to help me with data management?

A: Yes, this is an eligible cost on grant applications: you can request a salary to support a research data manager for your research project, as long as it is justified.

Q: According to CRUK policy, costs for data sharing can be budgeted in grant applications only from August 2015. What about research data from older projects, when these costs were not eligible in grant applications? Is there any transition fund available to pay for this?

A: Unfortunately, there are no additional funds to pay for these costs. Researchers who have older datasets that might be of significant value to the community should contact CRUK – all requests for support will be considered on a case by case basis.

Q: Wellcome Trust encourages data sharing and data re-use, but does not allow for costs of long-term data preservation to be budgeted in grant applications. This does not make sense to me.

A: We are still reviewing our policy on costs of data management and sharing and we might be revisiting this issue – however, it is problematic for us to consider estimated costs for preservation that extend before the life-time of the grant. Our understanding is that costs of long-term data preservation are often less significant than costs of initial data ingestion by the repository (and we will cover ingestion costs).

Q: Who is then going to pay for the long-term data storage?

A: Wellcome Trust funds some discipline-specific repositories, but this is done jointly with other funders. We support bigger undertakings and we are also working with partners to develop platforms for data sharing and discoverability in some priority areas (notably clinical trials). Cancer Research UK pays for some long-term storage options, if these are justified for particular needs of the project. These decisions are made on a case by case basis, depending on how the costs are justified and whether these are directly related to the scientific value of the project.

Metadata standards

Q: At the moment there are many general purpose and institutional repositories, which are not well structured. To support efficient re-use of data it is important to use structured data repositories and adhere to metadata standards. What are funders’ opinions about this?

A: Wherever possible, discipline-specific data repositories should be used preferentially over general purpose or institutional repositories. Adherence to discipline-specific metadata standards is also encouraged. It has to be acknowledged that development of well-structured data repositories is very resource-intensive and not all disciplines have good quality repositories to support them. For example, it took over 30 years to adapt unified metadata standards at Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. The time need to properly solve problems should never be underestimated.

Q: Are funders planning to provide researchers with a list of recommended schemas for metadata?

A: Biosharing is an excellent resource with references to discipline-specific metadata schemas. It is a useful suggestion to include a reference to Biosharing on our website.

Policy implementation

Q: Are you planning to monitor researchers’ adherence to data management plans? For example, the BBSRC does not have the manpower to check all data management plans manually, but they are planning to create a system to check if data has been uploaded automatically.

A: We are considering this. At the moment we require data management plans with the primary goal to encourage people to think about data management and sharing from the very start of the project.

Published 5 February 2016
Written by Dr Marta Teperek, verified by David Carr and Jamie Enoch
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Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing

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In 2015 the Cambridge Research Data Team organised several discussions between funders and researchers. In May 2015 we hosted Ben Ryan from EPSRC, which was followed by a discussion with Michael Ball from BBSRC in August. Now we have invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers.

David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) met with our academics on Friday 22 January at the Gurdon Institute. The Gurdon Institute was founded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and to foster a collaborative environment for independent research groups with diverse but complementary interests.

This blog summarises the presentations and discusses the data sharing expectations from Wellcome Trust and CRUK. A second related blog ‘In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK‘ summarises the question and answer session that was held with a group of researchers on the same day.

Wellcome Trust’s requirements for data management and sharing

Sharing research data is key for Wellcome’s goal of improving health

David Carr started his presentation explaining that the Wellcome Trust’s mission is to support research with the goal of improving health. Therefore, the Trust is committed to ensuring research outputs (including research data) can be accessed and used in ways that will maximise health and societal benefits. David reminded the audience of benefits of data sharing. Data which is shared has the potential to:

  • Enable validity and reproducibility of research findings to be assessed
  • Increase the visibility and use of research findings
  • Enable research outputs to be used to answer new questions
  • Reduce duplication and waste
  • Enable access to data to other key communities – public, policymakers, healthcare professionals etc.

Data sharing goes mainstream

David gave on overview of data sharing expectations from various angles. He started by referring to the Royal Society’s report from 2012: Science as an open enterprise, which sets sharing as the standard for doing science. He then also mentioned other initiatives like the G8 Science Ministers’ statement, the joint report from the Academy of Medical Sciences, BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome Trust on reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research and the UK Concordat on Open Research Data with a take-home message that sharing data and other research outputs is increasingly becoming a global expectation, and a core element of good research practice.

Wellcome Trust’s policy for open data

The next aspect of David’s presentation was Wellcome Trust’s policy on data management and sharing. The policy was first published almost a decade ago (2007) with subsequent modifications in 2010. The principle of the policy is simple: research data should be shared and preserved in a manner which maximises its value to advance research and improve health. Wellcome Trust also requires data management plans as a compulsory part of grant applications, where the proposed research is likely to generate a dataset that will have significant value to researchers and other users. This is to ensure that researchers understand the importance of data management and sharing and to plan for it from the start their projects.

Cost of data sharing

Planning for data management and sharing involves costing for these activities in the grant proposal. The Wellcome Trust’s FAQ guidance on data sharing policy says that: “The Trust considers that timely and appropriate data management and sharing should represent an integral component of the research process. Applicants may therefore include any costs associated with their proposed approach as part of their proposal.” David then outlined the types of costs that can be included in grant applications (including for dedicated staff, hardware and software, and data access costs). He noted that in the current draft guidance on costing for data management estimated costs for long-term preservation that extend beyond the lifetime of the grant are not eligible, although costs associated with the deposition of data in recognised data repositories can be requested.

Key priorities and emerging areas in data management and sharing

Infrastructure

The Wellcome Trust also identified key priorities and emerging areas where work needs to be done to better support of data management and sharing. The first one was to provide resources and platforms for data sharing and access. David pointed out that wherever available, discipline-specific data repositories are the best home for research data, as they provide rich metadata standards, community curation and better discoverability of datasets.

However, the sustainability of discipline-specific repositories is sometimes uncertain. Discipline-specific resources are often perceived as ‘free’. However, research data submitted to ‘free’ data repositories has to be stored somewhere and the amount of data produced and shared is growing exponentially – someone has to pay for the cost of storage and long-term curation in discipline-specific data repositories. An additional point for consideration is that many disciplines do not have their own repositories and therefore need to heavily rely on institutional support.

Access

Wellcome Trust funds a large number of projects in clinical areas. Dealing with patient data requires careful ethical considerations and planning from the very start of the project to ensure that data can be successfully shared at the end of the project. To support researchers in dealing with patient data The Expert Advisory Group on Data Access (a cross-funder advisory body established by MRC, ESRC, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust) has developed guidance documents and practice papers about handling of sensitive data: how to ask for informed consent, how to anonymise data and the procedures that need to be in place when granting access to data. David stressed that balance needs to be struck between maximising the use of data and the need to safeguard research participants.

Incentives for sharing

Finally, if sharing is to become the normal thing to do, researchers need incentives to do so. Wellcome Trust is keen to work with others to ensure that researchers who generate and share datasets of value receive appropriate recognition for their efforts. A recent report from the Expert Advisory Group on Data Access proposed several recommendations to incentivise data sharing, with specific roles for funders, research leaders, institutions and publishers. Additionally, in order to promote data re-use, the Wellcome Trust joined forces with the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and launched the Open Science Prize competition to encourage prototyping and development of services, tools or platforms that enable open content.

Cancer Research UK’s views on data sharing

The next talk was by Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK. Jamie started by saying that because Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is a charity funded by the public, it needs to ensure it makes the most of its funded research: sharing research data is elemental to this. Making the most of the data generated through CRUK grants could help accelerate progress towards the charity’s aim in its research strategy, to see three quarters of people surviving cancer by 2034. Jamie explained that his post – Research Funding Manager (Data) – has been created as a reflection of data sharing being increasingly important for CRUK.

The policy

Jamie started talking about the key principles of CRUK data sharing policy by presenting the main issues around research data sharing and explaining the CRUK’s position in relation to them:

  • What needs to be shared? All research data, including unpublished data, source code, databases etc, if it is feasible and safe to do so. CRUK is especially keen to ensure that data underpinning publications is made available for sharing.
  • Metadata: Researchers should adhere to community standards/minimum information guidelines where these exist.
  • Discoverability: Groups should be proactive in communicating the contents of their datasets and showcasing the data available for sharing

Jamie explained that CRUK really wants to increase the discoverability of data. For example, clinical trials units should ideally provide information on their websites about the data they generate and clear information about how it can be accessed.

  • Modes of sharing: Via community or generalist repositories, under the auspices of the PI or a combination of methods

Jamie explained that not all data can be/should be made openly available. Due to ethical considerations sometimes access to data will have to be restricted. Jamie explained that as long as restrictions are justified, it is entirely appropriate to use them. However, if access to data is restricted, the conditions on which access will be granted should be considered at the project outset, and these conditions will have to be clearly outlined in metadata descriptions to ensure fair governance of access.

  • Timeframes: Limited period of exclusive use permitted where justified

Jamie suggested adhering to community standards when thinking about any periods of exclusive use of generated research data. In some communities research data is made accessible at the time of publication. Other communities will expect data release at the time of generation (especially in collaborative genomics projects). Jamie further explained that particularly in cases where new data can affect policy development, it is key that research data is released as soon as possible.

  • Preservation: Data to be retained for at least 5 years after grant end
  • Acknowledgement: Secondary users of data should credit original researcher and CRUK
  • Costs: Appropriately justified costs can be included in grant proposals

As of late 2015, financial support for data management and sharing can be requested as a running cost in grant applications. Jamie explained that there are no particular guidelines in place explaining eligible and non-eligible costs and that the most important aspect is whether the costs are well justified or not, and reasonable in the context of the research envisaged.

Jamie stressed that the key point of the CRUK policy is to facilitate data sharing and to engage with the research community, recognising the challenges of data sharing for different projects and the need to work through these collaboratively, rather than enforce the policy in a top-down fashion.

Policy implementation

Subsequently, the presentation discussed ways in which CRUK policy is implemented. Jamie explained that the main tool for the policy implementation is the new requirement for data management plans as compulsory part of grant applications.

Two of the three main response mode committees: Science Committee and Clinical Research Committee have a two-step process of writing a data management plan. During the grant application stage researchers need to write a short, free-form description about how they plan to adhere to CRUK’s policy on data sharing. Only if the grant is accepted, the beneficiary will be asked to write a more detailed data management plan, in consultation with CRUK representatives.

This approach serves two purposes as it:

  • ensures that all applicants are aware of CRUK’s expectations on data sharing (they all need to write a short paragraph about data sharing)
  • saves researchers’ time: only those applicants who were successful will have to provide a detailed data management plan, and it allows the CRUK office to engage with successful applicants on data sharing challenges and opportunities

In contrast, applicants for the other main CRUK response mode committee, the Population Research Committee, all fill out a detailed data management and sharing plan at application stage because of the critical importance of sharing data from cohort and epidemiological studies.

Outlooks for the future

Similarly to the Wellcome Trust, CRUK realised that cultural change is needed for sharing to become the normality. CRUK have initiated many national and international partnerships to help the reward of data sharing.

One of them is a collaboration with the YODA (Yale Open Data Access) project aiming to develop metrics to monitor and evaluate data sharing. Other areas of collaborative work include collaboration with other funders on development of guidelines on ethics of data management and sharing, platforms for data preservation and discoverability, procedures for working with population and clinical data. Jamie stressed that the key thing for CRUK is to work closely with researchers and research managers – to understand the challenges and work through these collaboratively, and consider exciting new initiatives to move the data sharing field forwards.

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Published 5 February 2016
Written by Dr Marta Teperek, verified by David Carr and Jamie Enoch
Creative Commons License