Web widget nudges scientists to share their data

A free web-based tool that promises to help its users ask authors of research papers to publicly share their data — and to make such requests publicly trackable — launched in beta version on 7 March.

The Open Data Button — a downloadable web-browser extension — can be clicked when a reader is looking at a research paper and wants to see its underlying data, says Joseph McArthur, who is co-leading the project and is assistant director of the policy advocacy group The Right to Research Coalition (R2RC) in London. The button is currently available only for Google Chrome users.

When clicked, the button generates a template e-mail which the user can send to the paper’s authors. It asks them to share the data supporting the paper, explains how to do so and — if the user has typed in the information — states why the data would be useful. All requests are simultaneously publicly posted on the Open Data Button website, where anyone can comment on existing entries to note that they want access to the same data sets.

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