Most of the time Data is not thought of as being a publishable, or a shareable output of research in the same way that publications are. The fact that research date is increasingly now digitised means that it has never been easier to share data on a more detailed level.

There are also a number of other reasons why you might consider sharing your own research data:

Benefits to the researcher

• Find and develop new and existing collaborations
• Improve impact of research through uptake by practitioners and industry.
• Improve impact of research through data reuse by other researchers and where shared data is reused this can be used by the originating researcher as evidence of impact, helping career progression.
• Increase visibility of research (often receive more citations than those whose data are kept private).
• Improve trust in published research findings
• Encourage others to share data you could use
• Funding bodies require data from funded projects to be shared publicly available where possible (see: UKRI Open Access policy).

Benefits to the research community

• Enable full value to be extracted from large datasets
• Enable unforeseen reuses of data
• Enable new research questions integrating multiple data sources
• Enable testing and development of new techniques on existing data
• Improve efficiency by building on existing data instead of regenerating it
• Improve reliability and integrity of research record
• Support open scientific enquiry

Benefits to the general public

• Improve return on investment for research funding
• Reduce the need for similar experiments to be repeated

UK Data Archive checklist for sharing your data.