The State of Open Data 2024: Special Report Bridging policy and practice in data sharing

The State of Open Data survey continues to provide a detailed and sustained insight into the motivations, challenges, perceptions, and behaviors of researchers towards open data. Now in its ninth year, the survey is a collaboration between Figshare, Digital Science and Springer Nature. Uniquely this year we wanted to go beyond understanding the thoughts and attitudes of researchers and, for the first time, look into what they were actually doing.

By combining three different data sources; Dimensions, Springer Nature Data Availability Statements (DAS) and the Wellcome-funded Make Data Count and DataCite Data Citation corpus (MDC DCC), we reveal linkages between peer reviewed published research and data sets being made available. We believe this jump from understanding what people say they are going to do to actively showing what they are doing, is an important step in driving change and understanding how to bridge the gap between policy and practice in open data sharing.

Version 2 is the result of a clarification on the naming and framing of the Data Citation Corpus. Initially referred to in version 1 as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Data Citation Corpus (CZI DCC), the corpus is an initiative by Make Data Count and DataCite and funded by Wellcome. In version 2, this corpus is referred to a MDC DCC.