A minimum data sharing policy?

To follow up on the post about the 12 steps to creating a new data policy, here is a first set of thought of what a high-level template for a data sharing policy might look like.

All data policies provide guidelines for adhering to the principle that data sharing is a good thing. While the particular rules of sharing might be different for a variety of reasons, the general tenets are largely the same.

Might it be possible to encapsulate these basic tenets into a terse minimum data sharing policy that could fit many (all?) situations?

This was in fact one of the recommendation of our Omics data sharing paper:

"We recommend that a single, brief, high-level consensus guideline serve as a template for policy documents at the funder, community, and project levels. At its heart should be the public and timely release of data. It should be based on the principle that funders and the research community must work together to develop best practice."

If such a high level general policy is possible it could contain simple content like this:

A minimum data policy

As an initiative/project/research scientist you will:

- continuously seek to comply with best practices in data sharing
- comply with relevant policies of funders
- strive to share your data with your colleagues and the wider world
- comply with relevant reporting standards
- cite any and all use of public data
- support Open Access publishing and Open Source software solutions
- cost appropriate resources into your grants to cover basic
data management and data sharing best practices
- participate in community efforts when you have opinions,
expertise to contribute
- work with funding agencies to help support you (the community) in complying with this policy


Of course, authors would then add relevant details to these basic statements to make their specific stance explicit.

Right now these statements combine both principles (data sharing should be part of the fabric of research) and practices (use standards as far as possible).

While a data policy based just on practices could easily be distilled from such a general guideline, policies that included strong principles would best start to bring about real-world data sharing.