The technical barriers to the access to knowledge were minimised through the potential of online access over the internet but reality fell behind expectations. This discrepancy between expectations for broader access to knowledge and the barriers still encountered led to the formation of initiatives to promote access to knowledge, culminating in the ‘Berlin Declaration for Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities’ (Berlin Declaration 2003) which has meanwhile been signed by 572 institutions. In this declaration, the signatories call for open access not only to scholarly literature but also to research data. The Berlin Declaration was followed by the ‘Recommendations for Access to Data from Publicly Funded Research’ issued by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2006) and have since been implemented as policies in the OECD member states.

The policy papers on the importance of making research data available appeal to the common good but make few suggestions how the desired cultural change is going to be achieved and have not lead to a large scale change in data sharing practices (Kratz and Strasser 2015). Statements by researchers on their willingness to share data come with the best intentions but rarely go beyond lip service and bear little resemblance with the actual release of data (Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing 2015).

Discussions about sharing data in science often revolve around ‘finding the right incentives’ (e.g. Nelson 2009; Borgman 2012). Given the important role of publication and citation in scholarship it is widely assumed that formal data publication would be an incentive for researchers to make data available (Costello 2009; Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing 2015; Kratz and Strasser 2015; Van den Eynden et al. 2016).

Studies by Piwowar and Vision (2013), Sears (2011), and others show that publications that have publicly accessible data accompanying them are cited more frequently and over a longer period of time than publications without access to the underlying data. This citation advantage, however, takes many years to show effect (Sears 2011) and is less than expected (Piwowar and Vision 2013). Inconsistent citation practices for data may contribute to underestimating the impact of data publications (Belter 2014).

Data publication follows the forms developed for the publication of research papers and similar and new metrics are being developed to gauge its impact. But is it the data or the intellectual work that we are interested in as peers? Does the recognition gained by data publication merit the additional effort?

Data publication may not be the only form of sharing data (Parsons and Fox 2013) but it might serve as a proxy for the degree to which Open Access policies have changed researchers’ behaviours.

It is difficult to find comprehensive numbers for the total of all data publications. In this discussion I want to focus on the fields of science, technology and medicine (STM) because research data in these fields are primarily produced by the researchers themselves. And because in these fields formal ways for data publication have existed for a couple of years now, the practices and the evolution of data sharing through publication are best documented. Formal data publication is also a useful proxy for the availability of data because studies have shown that data not published through formal channels become unavailable very quickly (Vines et al. 2014). This paper therefore focuses on data that stand a good chance of being discoverable by users and still being available.

In the years 2005 to 2016 roughly 30 million STM papers were published (Ware and Mabe 2015). A certain proportion of data are published as supplementary materials on the publishers’ or project websites and other informal pathways, but as noted above, these forms of making data available are ephemeral. The volume of formal data publications through DataCite for the time period 2005 to 2016 is approximately 2.6 million data publications (THOR Project 2016). Of these 2.6 million data sets 800,000 are from the marine environmental sciences and have been published through PANGAEA (THOR Project 2016). GenBank has about 260,000 entries for published genomic data (Benson et al. 2013). About 16,400 PURL identifiers are being used in the entire scholarly record indexed by Google Scholar. Of these, less than 5,000 seem to identify digital objects like data, most seem to identify semantic concepts. Life Science Identifiers (LSID) were introduced in 2004 as a way to naming and identifying data resources stored in multiple, distributed data stores for life sciences research. Using Google Scholar as a search engine locates about 14,000 LSIDs that have been used in the scientific literature.

Not all publications come with data, but the majority of STM publications do. Conversely, not all published data are being used in publications. Also, in medicine, psychology and empirical social studies the involvement of human subjects limits the sharing of data. Still, comparing 30 million STM publications to three million data publications shows us that data sharing through research data repositories is still not the norm (e.g. Baronchelli et al. 2006; ‘Share Alike’ 2014).

In ‘Gift Giving as an Organizing Principle in Science’, Hagstrom (1982) presents an account of the ‘gift-giving’ nature of scientific contribution to journals, in which information is traded for recognition, which in turn is thought to motivate scientists. Hagstrom argues that such an exchange system generates commitment to social norms among peers. Ethnographic observation among groups of researchers reported by Wallis, Rolando, and Borgman (2013) are interpreted by the authors to support Hagstrom’s hypothesis that scholarship is characterised by a gift culture in which members of the community make each other precious gifts.

This exchange of goods in a gift culture is not organised as a barter but as an exchange of precious gifts with the expectation of receiving a precious gift in return sometime in the future (Mauss 2011). In the case of the scholarly community precious gifts could be an invitation to speak at a conference, referrals of talented students, access to instruments and other resources, pre-prints of papers in the pre-digital days, and, last but not least, access to data. Putting data on the internet for anonymous users without being able to expect a gift in return is not an incentive in this model of scholarly culture as this violates the principle of reciprocity that is fundamental to the gift culture.

The elements of interaction between research peers can also be described as elements of a researcher’s social capital. Other than Coleman (1988), Bourdieu (1983) does not define social capital as a characteristic of an entire social group, but as means of an individual to influence social transactions and rise in social rank. In the context of the scholarly community, data are a form of social capital. Controlled sharing of data with peers adds power to the network of obligations, expectations and trustworthiness of social structures among peers.

The interpretation of science as a gift culture has been disputed by Latour and Woolgar (1982) who argue that science actually has a currency they identify as credibility. This currency can be transformed into other forms of capital which they identify as money, data, prestige, credentials, problem areas, argument, papers, and so on. Latour and Woolgar distinguish between reward and credibility, focusing on the difference between the process by which reward is bestowed and the process by which credibility is assessed. Both reward and credibility originate from how a researcher’s work is received by his or her peers, which can also be seen as his peers trust in the researcher’s ability to produce valuable research in the future.

The system of credibility and reward in the scholarly community has been described by Fecher et al. (2015) as a reputation economy. In this model of a reputation economy publishing a paper leads to reception by peers. A positive reception will result in an increase in reputation among peers and thus increases the likelihood of being awarded with funding for future research. Research funding gives access to equipment and other resources needed to acquire new data. These data can then be discussed and deliver new arguments for the researcher’s engagement in the scientific discourse and the results can then be published. The publication is then received by the researcher’s peers, a positive recognition adding to the reputation to the researcher. And so the cycle of the reputation economy continues. Success is measured by the efficiency of conversion of one form of capital into another. The elements of the reputation economy, and how these relate to each other, are summarised in Figure 1.

Every researcher has a personal motivation that brought him or her to choose a career in research. To follow their pursuits in research, individuals need access to resources - and be it their own salary. Access to resources is strongly influenced by the individual’s reputation among his or her peers. To rise to the highest ranks in the academic system a researcher does not only need to deliver good and solid work but ‘exceptional’ work bestow on him or her the reputation of being a ‘distinguished’ researcher. This quest to distinguish oneself from one’s peers makes research a highly competitive pursuit (Hagstrom 1971; Haeussler 2011).

At the same time research is becoming a more and more collaborative exercise (Kowalczyk and Shankar 2011). There are fields where the required resources go beyond the scale of individual grants. Projects like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN or ocean going research cruises extend well beyond the means of an individual researcher, sometimes even beyond the means of entire nations. There is no reputation to be gained in these fields without collaboration. In this system the researcher has to strike a balance between reputation gain and collaboration gain. It is in these fields that require a large degree of collaboration that we see the most advanced technical and cultural mechanisms for sharing research data. Several examples are given in a report by the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices (2013).

Considering these two opposing drivers, reputation and collaboration, a researcher’s behaviour is strongly influenced by the trade-off between reputation gain and collaboration gain. The fundamental difference between disciplines is the trade-of between reputation and collaboration at points of the reputation economy where changes in the form of capital occur. Sharing data as a form of collaboration must be balanced by a similar gain in reputation. At the same time, collaborative disciplines enforce data sharing as a social norm where non-compliance will result in some form of penalty like exclusion from access to collaborative resources.