Data sharing

Sharing research findings and research data allows others to build upon research already conducted. In the health sciences, this can help to increase the translation of research into practice and improve patient care. For a number of ethical, legal, and privacy reasons, sharing data from clinical research tends to be more complex than sharing research data from other disciplines, such as life sciences.

Monash Health procedure

Publication and Dissemination of Research Findings, an internal procedure available via Prompt, details specific responsibilities of researchers at Monash Health.

 You may need Human Ethics approval to share data. Additional approvals may need to be sought to re-use existing data, even if approval was previously granted for the original project. Check with Research Support Services.

Practical guidance on data sharing 

If you intend to share or publish your research data, you must plan for this at the beginning of your research project. To help the planning process, templates for data management plans will generally include a section on sharing your data or otherwise disseminating your results.

Below are helpful resources produced by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), which became the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) in 2018.

• Publishing and Sharing Sensitive Data
• Publishing and Sharing Sensitive Data
• De-identification (of data)
• Health and Medical Data

The National Institutes of Health (US) also provides examples of data sharing plans and methods for data sharing.

Data Sharing and Management Snafu in Three Short Acts 

A data management story covering storage, documentation, and file formats. It looks at what can go wrong when a researcher does not manage files and data correctly, and how this affects the ability to later share valuable research data.