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Data sharing is widely believed to be beneficial to science and is now supported by digitization and new online infrastructures for sharing datasets. Nevertheless, differences in research cultures and the sporadic development of data repositories, support services, guidelines, and policies have resulted in uneven data sharing and reuse practices. An overall understanding of the current situation is therefore needed to identify gaps and next steps. In response, using two case studies and two surveys, this dissertation explores the current landscape and identifies challenges within data sharing and reuse practices. The results demonstrate how present systems and policies could be modified to support and encourage these activities. The researcher survey found that the type and format of data produced, as well as systematic data sharing varied between disciplines, with Physical Sciences and Earth and Planetary Sciences leading and Business and Economics, Engineering, and Medicine lagging in some respects. Surveys and observations were frequently produced in most fields, with samples and simulations being common in science and engineering and qualitative data being more prevalent in the social sciences, business, and humanities. Researchers who had prior data reuse experience shared data more frequently (56.8%, n=1,004) than those who only used their primary data for research (32.6%, n=396). The biodiversity case study and surveys show that secondary data are valuable for many purposes, but most struggle to find datasets to reuse. Data citations can incentivize data sharing, although a lack of appropriate data citations and reliable technologies make it difficult to efficiently track them. In biodiversity, where the sharing and reuse of open data via mature infrastructures is common, citing secondary datasets in references or data access statements has been increasing (48%, n=99). However, users simultaneously exploiting many data subsets in this field complicate the situation. This thesis makes recommendations for handling large numbers of biodiversity data subsets to attribute citations accurately. It also suggests further enhancements for the article-dataset linking service, Scholexplorer, to automatically capture such links. Based on responses from data repository managers, this research further identifies nine objectives for future repository systems. Specifically, 30% (n=34) of the surveyed managers would like integration and interoperability between data and systems, 19% (n=22) want better research data management tools, 16% (n=18) want tools that allow computation without downloading datasets, and 16% (n=18) want automated systems. It also makes 23 recommendations in three categories to support data sharing and promote further data reuse including 1) improved access and usability of data, as well as formal data citations; 2) improved search systems with suggested new features; and 3) cultural and policy-related issues around awareness and acceptance, incentives, collaboration, guidelines, and documentation. Finally, based on researcher feedback, this study proposes an alternative scoring model that combines a dataset quality score and a data reuse indicator that can be incorporated in academic evaluation systems. The outcomes from this research will help funders, policymakers and technology developers prioritize areas of improvement to incentivize data sharing and support data reuse with easily discoverable and usable data.

In recent years, the UK higher education sector has seen notable policy changes with regard to how research is funded, disseminated and evaluated. Important amongst these changes is the emphasis that policy makers have placed on disseminating peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles via Open Access (OA) publishing routes e.g. OA journals or OA repositories. Through the Open Science agenda there have also been a number of initiatives to promote the dissemination of other types of output that have not traditionally been made publicly available via the scholarly communication system, such as data, workflows and methodologies. The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 introduced social/economic impact of research as an evaluation measure. This has been a significant policy shift away from academic impact being the sole measure of impact and has arguably raised the profile of public engagement activities (although it should be noted that public engagement is not equivalent to social/economic impact, but is an important pathway to realising such impact). This exploratory study sought to investigate the extent to which these recent policy changes are aligned with researchers publication, dissemination and public engagement practices across different disciplines. Furthermore, it sought to identify the perceptions and attitudes of researchers towards the concept of social/economic impact. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach consisting of a questionnaire- based survey and semi-structured interviews with researchers from a broad range of disciplines across the physical, health, engineering, social sciences, and arts and humanities across fifteen UK universities. The work of Becher (1987) and Becher & Trowler (2001) on disciplinary classification was used as an explanatory framework to understand disciplinary differences. The study found evidence of a lack of awareness of the principle of OA by some researchers across all disciplines; and that researchers, in the main, are not sharing their research data, therefore only the few who are doing so are realising the benefits that have been championed in research funders policies. Moreover, the study uncovered that due to the increased emphasis of impact in research evaluation, conflicting goals between researchers and academic leaders exist. The study found that researchers, particularly from Applied and Interdisciplinary (as opposed to Pure) disciplinary groups felt that research outputs such as articles published in practitioner journals were most appropriate in targeting and making research more accessible to practitioners, than prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. The thesis argues that there is still more to learn about what impact means to researchers and how it might be measured. The thesis makes an overall contribution to knowledge on a general level by providing greater understanding of how researchers have responded to the impact agenda . On a more specific level, the thesis identifies the effect of the impact agenda on academic autonomy, and situates this in different disciplinary contexts. It identifies that it is not only researchers from Pure disciplines who feel disadvantaged by the impact agenda , but also those from Interdisciplinary and Applied groups who feel an encroachment on their academic autonomy, particularly in selecting channels to disseminate their research and in selecting the relevant audiences they wish to engage with. Implications of the study s findings on researchers, higher education institutions and research funders are highlighted and recommendations to researchers, academic leaders and research funders are given.

Research data is essential to scholarship. The value of research data and its management has been increasingly recognized by policy makers and higher education institutions. A deep understanding of disciplinary practices is vital to develop culturally-sensitive policy, tools and services for successful data management. Previous research has shown that data practices vary across sub-fields and disciplines. However, much less is known about how disciplinary cultures shape data practices. There is a need to theorise research data practices based on empirical evidence in order to inform policy, tools and services. The aim of the thesis is to examine the interrelation between data practices and disciplinary cultures within geography. Geography is well-established and multidisciplinary, consisting of elements from the sciences, social sciences and humanities. By examining a single discipline this thesis develops a theoretical understanding of research data practices at a finer level of granularity than would be achieved by looking at broad disciplinary groupings such as the physical and social sciences. Data collection and analysis consisted of two phases. Phase one was exploratory, including an analysis of geography department websites and researcher web profiles and a bibliometric study of collaboration patterns based on co-authorship. Phase one aimed to understand the disciplinary characteristics of geography in preparation for Phase two. The second phase consisted of a series of 23 semi-structured interviews with researchers in geography, which aimed to understand researchers data practices and their attitudes toward data sharing within the context of the sub-discipline(s) they inhabited. The findings of the thesis show that there are contrasting intellectual, social and data differences between physical and human geography. For example, intellectually, these two branches of geography differ in terms of their research objects and methods; socially, they differ in terms of the scale of their collaborative activities and the motivations to collaborate; furthermore, the nature of data, how data is collected and data sharing practices are also different between physical and human geography. The thesis concludes that differences in the notion of data and data sharing practices are grounded in disciplinary characteristics. The thesis develops a new three-dimensional framework to better understand the notion of data from a disciplinary perspective. The three dimensions are (1) physical form, (2) intellectual content and (3) social construction. Furthermore, Becher and Trowler s (2001) disciplinary taxonomy i.e. hard-soft/pure-applied, and the concepts urban-rural ways of life and convergent-divergent communities, is shown to be useful to explain the diverse data sharing practices of geographers. The thesis demonstrates the usefulness of applying disciplinary theories to the sphere of research data management.

การศึกษาครั้งนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์ เพื่อศึกษาสถานที่ค้นคว้าข้อมูลของคณาจารย์ และระดับความต้องการของคณาจารย์ที่ใช้บริการค้นคว้าข้อมูลจากห้องสมุด งานบริหารทรัพยากรการเรียนรู้ คณะแพทยศาสตร์โรงพยาบาลรามาธิบดี มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล การค้นคว้าข้อมูลแบ่งเป็น 2 ประเภทคือ ค้นคว้าข้อมูลจากสื่อสิ่งพิมพ์รูปแบบตัวเล่ม และจากสื่ออิเล็กทรอนิกส์รูปแบบออนไลน์ กลุ่มตัวอย่างที่ใช้เป็นคณาจารย์ในสังกัด คณะแพทยศาสตร์โรงพยาบาลรามาธิบดี ตอบแบบสอบถามโดยสมัครใจ จำนวน 151 คน สถิติที่ใช้สำหรับการแปลผลข้อมูล คือ ค่าร้อยละ ผลการศึกษาพบว่า สถานที่ค้นคว้าข้อมูลของคณาจารย์ มีการค้นคว้าข้อมูลทั้งภายในและภายนอก คณะแพทยศาสตร์โรงพยาบาลรามาธิบดี โดยส่วนใหญ่เป็นการค้นคว้าข้อมูลอยู่ภายใน คณะแพทยศาสตร์โรงพยาบาลรามาธิบดี สำหรับความต้องการค้นคว้าข้อมูล พบว่าคณาจารย์ส่วนใหญ่ต้องการใช้วารสารภาษาอังกฤษและหนังสือภาษาอังกฤษ ที่เป็นสื่ออิเล็กทรอนิกส์รูปแบบออนไลน์มากกว่าการค้นคว้าข้อมูลด้วยสื่ออิเล็กทรอนิกส์รูปแบบออนไลน์ที่เป็นวารสารภาษาไทยและหนังสือไทย นอกจากนี้ ยังมีความต้องการค้นคว้าข้อมูลด้วยวารสารภาษาอังกฤษและหนังสือภาษาอังกฤษที่เป็นสื่ออิเล็กทรอนิกส์รูปแบบออนไลน์มากกว่าการค้นคว้าข้อมูลจากวารสารภาษาไทยและหนังสือภาษาไทยที่เป็นสิ่งพิมพ์รูปแบบตัวเล่มเช่นกัน