Researchers and research data: challenges in improving and incentivising sharing and archiving

There has been a lot of discussion within the scientific community around the issues of reproducibility in research, with questions being raised about the integrity of research due to failure to reproduce or confirm the findings of some of the studies. Researchers need to adhere to the FAIR principles to contribute to collaborative and open science, but these principles can also support reproducibility and issues around ensuring data integrity.

Based on observations and data integrity related activities as a Research Integrity and Data Specialist at the Francis Crick Institute, potential reasons behind a slow uptake of FAIR data practices are discussed alongside solutions where institutes and universities can step in to improve the integrity of research from a data perspective. One major solution discussed is the implementation of a data archive system at the Francis Crick Institute to ensure the integrity of data long term, comply with our funders’ data management requirements, and provide protection in situations where questions about the integrity of a research article might be raised.

Presented as part of the International Digital Curation Conference 2024.