Data-sharing success stories from HRB-funded researchers
| 29 January, 2025 | Jack Nash |
The open data movement is rapidly gaining momentum, with many governments and international organisations worldwide announcing open data initiatives and policies that support data reuse. The Health Research Board and HRB Open Research advocate their own Open Data Policy, encouraging researchers to make data as open as possible and as closed as necessary.
We highlight the benefits of open data and data-sharing success stories from real HRB-funded researchers to demonstrate open data in action.
Why choose to share your data openly?
When you choose open data, it helps others replicate your study and validate your results. As such, open data is a fundamental requirement for reproducibility and transparency, benefiting not just the individual researcher, but the research community, and wider society.
When the data underlying academic research is made open, it makes it easier to question, share, replicate, validate, confirm, and build upon the evidence that underpins the results.
Key benefits of open data include:
- Boosting the credibility of your research: open data enables replication and validation of your research, boosting its credibility and robustness. By sharing your data openly, your entire research project becomes more transparent (and satisfies funder requirements).
- Enhancing your work’s visibility: increase your research’s discoverability by reciprocally linking your article and its related datasets. Plus, describing your data with rich, meaningful, machine-readable metadata makes it easy for humans (and computers!) to find and use.
- Progressing in your career: Researchers can benefit from increased credit and recognition for their outputs by sharing their research data, which may lead to increased opportunities for collaboration—even across disciplines. Plus, one 2019 study suggests that open data can generate up to 25% more citations!
- Developing a better understanding of your field: Open data supports learning and enables a richer understanding of the research topic. This is particularly useful in teaching, as students can interrogate raw research data for themselves.
Data-sharing in action
But what does data-sharing look like in practice? Take a look below at two data-sharing success stories from HRB-funded authors who have published on HRB Open Research.
Cohort profile update: The Cork and Kerry Diabetes and Heart Disease Study
This 2023 Data Note from Stamenic et al. describes new data collected on cardiovascular health and associated risk factors as part of the Cork and Kerry Diabetes and Heart Disease Study.
The study was established to investigate the prevalence of diabetes and cardiovascular disease among middle-aged adults in Ireland. This updated data has allowed researchers to establish potentially inappropriate medication prescribing behaviour among older people in primary care and suggest that routine application of prescribing guidelines in this population has the potential to improve medication appropriateness.
Additionally, it introduced a new assessment of hypertension detection, awareness, and control, as well as an assessment of the role of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. Furthermore, the rescreen has also provided new insights into physical activity patterns and cardiovascular health.
The Data Note Article has been viewed over 500 times, downloaded over 70 times.
GNOSIS: an R Shiny app supporting cancer genomics survival analysis with cBioPortal
This Software Tool Article illustrates how GNOSIS, an R Shiny app, supports clinician-researchers by helping them to explore and visualise clinical and genomic data more easily.
Typically, cancer genomics data is curated and held in specialist repositories, where users need advanced programming skills and expertise to analyse the data meaningfully. This is problematic for clinician-researchers, as they first need to obtain this additional expertise before being able to investigate cancer genome data. This halts discoveries that could positively affect patient outcomes.
Instead, GNOSIS simplifies the process of analysing cancer genomic data by providing an intuitive interface to aid data analysis, and downloadable resources to help develop computing skills.
The Software Tool Article has been viewed over 1,000 times, downloaded over 80 times. Read more about this Software Tool Article in our author interview.
To learn more about the benefits of sharing data, visit our Data Notes resources page. And if you’re ready to join the thousands of HRB-funded researchers already publishing their work with HRB Open Research, submit your research for publication today.