Researcher's willingness to submit data for data sharing: A case study on a data archive for psychology

Abstract

Data sharing has gained importance in scientific communities because scientific associations and funding organizations require long term preservation and dissemination of data. To support psychology researchers in data archiving and data sharing, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information developed an archiving facility for psychological research data in Germany: PsychData. In this paper we report different types of data requests that were sent to researchers with the aim of building up a sustainable data archive. Resulting response rates were rather low, however, comparable to those published by other authors. Possible reasons for the reluctance of researchers to submit data are discussed.