In order for the field of science to uphold principles of transparency, openness, and reproducibility, policies and practices that incentivize the open sharing of data will be needed (Nosek et al.,2015). A shift to a more open science paradigm will require changes on the parts of government agencies, academicinstitutions, funding agencies/organizations, journals, and the researchers themselves. For example, journals are now beginning to require that data be shared in order for manuscripts to be published in accordance with guidelines created by the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee (Nosek et al.,2015). Major biophysical and social science journals are among the signatories to the TOP guidelines, including Science, American Journal of Political Science, Behavioral Science and Policy, Political Science Research and Methods, Research and Politics, Sociological Science, and Survey Research Methods, among many others (for a full list see: Center for Open Science, 2015 ). At the institutional level, changes will come in the forms of new policies and, to be effective, will be accompanied by training, tools, and other resources to help researchers meet these new policies. However, on the fundamental level, researchers will need to adopt practices within their own workflow that support open science. In considering such a shift toward open science, current knowledge about the needs, behaviors, and attitudes of researchers can be informative.
The results reported here provide insights on addressing the challenges of data management, sharing, and archiving in an emerging era of public accountability for scientific integration and transparency. The results from this project are organized as follows: We first summarize the characteristics of the interview and survey subjects (see Appendix 1 for a complete methodological description). We then delineate the needs, behaviors and views of the managers and researchers we surveyed or interviewed. Then, we describe current approaches to addressing these needs and meeting federal requirements. Finally, we provide an overview of tools and services available.
