Researchers' attitudes and perceptions towards data sharing and data reuse in the field of food science and technology

This work analyses the perception and practice of sharing, reusing, and facilitating access to research data in the field of food science and technology. The study involved the coordination of a focus group discussion and an online survey, to understand and evince the behaviour of researchers regarding data management in that field. Both the discussion group and the survey were performed with researchers from several institutes of the Spanish National Research Council. The lack of a data sharing culture, the fear of being scooped, and confusion between the concepts of the working plan and the data management plan were some of the issues that emerged in the focus group. Respondents' previous experience with sharing their research data has been mainly in the form of appendices to peer-reviewed publications. From the survey (101 responses), the most important motivations for publishing research data were found to be facilitating the reproducibility of the research, increasing the likelihood of citations of the article, and compliance with funding body mandates. Legal constraints, intellectual property, data ownership, data rights, potential commercial exploitation, and misuse of data were the main barriers to publishing data as open data. Citation in publications, certification, compliance with standards, and the reputation of the data providers were the most relevant factors affecting the use of other researchers' data. Being recent or recently updated, well documented, with quality metadata and ease of access were the most valued attributes of open research data.