Data sharing policies and incentives for data sharing: An interview study with members of funding agencies

This dataset contains anonymized transcripts of interviews performed during a qualitative interview study with members of 16 research funding agencies.

Sample: Funding agencies were located mainly, but not exclusively, in Europe. Funding agencies were selected using a purposive sampling strategy that aimed to acquire sufficient representation of (a) national and international agencies; (b) public and philanthropic agencies; and (c) agencies in continental European and the anglophone world. Suitable funding agencies were selected through various means, such as a list of health research funding organizations according to their annual expenditure on health research (https://www.healthresearchfunders.org/health-research-funding-organizations/) and Science Europe Working Groups.

Background: Open science policy documents have emphasized the need to install more incentives for data sharing. These incentives are often understood as being reputational or financial. Additionally, there are other policy measures that could be taken, such as data sharing mandates.

Aim: To document views of funding agencies on (1) potential alterations to recognition systems in academia; (2) incentives to enhance the sharing of cohort data; (3) data sharing policies in terms of the governance of cohort data; (4) other potential interactions between science policy and data sharing platforms for cohorts. Our study focused on the sharing of patient- and population-based cohorts through data infrastructures.