At Wiley, the researcher is our ‘North Star’ as explained by Judy Verses (Executive Vice President, Wiley) in her keynote talk at the APE2019 conference in Berlin, Germany [7]. This means that we put researchers at the heart of our research publishing and educational services. We listen to the research communities we serve and – by tailoring open research initiatives to the needs of researchers in particular disciplines – we support their open research aspirations. Adopting open practices, but phasing their implementation to suit different communities, is our focus. We organize our work in five key areas: open access, open practices, open collaboration, open recognition and reward, and of course, open data [8].
Open data is an often-used term for sharing data, and is perhaps made more meaningful by the term FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) [9]. After open access, open data (or better: FAIR data) is probably one of the most important elements of open research [10]. FAIR data has the potential to revolutionize the way research is done and communicated and we are seeing benefits in research discoveries as a result [11]. Open research initiatives, like open data, bring many benefits including increased transparency as well as, potentially, enhanced reproducibility and amplified impact [12]. Funders and institutions recognize this, and are increasingly requiring researchers to share data.
However, given the scale and variety of data, the complexity of how best to share data, the need for the adoption of new practices and habits by research communities, and the need for technology and infrastructure to support data sharing, it is clear that collaboration across all stakeholders is key. This is a challenge we all must embrace, if we are going to make progress.
To reflect our commitment to open research and to supporting researchers in sharing their data, Wiley recently updated its data sharing and citation policies [13]. In the rest of this article, we will share the approach we took and our findings so far.