Navigating the future of data sharing: The impact and cost of expanded public access requirements

Updates to US Federal government policies requiring public access to federally funded research are prompting concerns over the cost and effort required to meet expanded public access requirements. Funders’ policies typically allow researchers to include the costs associated with providing public access in their grant proposal budgets. Invest in Open Infrastructure’s research seeks to shed light on what constitutes “reasonable” cost for providing public access to data and publications. We will present quantitative findings on the characteristics of datasets arising from US federally funded research, and summarize available information on the cost of providing data sharing services along with the price those services charge to researchers or their institutions. Finally, we will share our approach to and preliminary results from qualtitative research with stakeholder groups: researchers and their institutions, repositories, and scholarly societies. For each actor in the system, we seek to understand their plans, workflows, decision points, and concerns with respect to the evolving requirements. While this project takes a US focus, the findings are of broad potential interest as the practice of open science and research data sharing are referenced in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, and subject to numerous national research funder policies around the world.