From competition to collaboration: Fostering a culture of data sharing in the NIH HEAL Data Ecosystem
Key Points
- Impact Statement: This paper addresses many common barriers to data sharing and highlights benefits that can outweigh some of these perceptions. Sharing this information with researchers can be very useful in promoting a culture of data sharing.
- Open research data is crucial for scientific discovery, but many researchers are hesitant to share their data.
- The HEAL Data Ecosystem (HDE) is working to encourage data sharing by engaging researchers and fostering a sharing culture.
- This occasional paper explores barriers to data sharing, potential incentives, and strategies HDE uses to build a supportive data-sharing community.
Abstract
Open, accessible research data provides a foundation for scientific discovery. Despite clear data sharing benefits and increased data sharing expectations, hesitancy to share data is common in many scientific research domains. This case study highlights work underway in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)–sponsored project Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) Data Ecosystem (HDE). HDE has initiated a suite of activities designed to engage HEAL-funded investigators and promote a data sharing culture. In this paper, we present results of a landscape analysis highlighting (1) common barriers to data sharing and (2) incentives identified by scholars that may help researchers overcome these barriers. We describe current strategies HDE employs to support a data sharing community.
© 2026 RTI International. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Kira Bradford
