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National Health and Medical Research Council

NHMRC Statement on Data Sharing

The NHMRC Open Access Policy will be informative as you consider what you will write in an application for NHMRC research funding.

The underlying principles are as follows:
 

"One of NHMRC’s primary roles is to fund high quality health and medical research and ensure that the Australian community receives health and economic benefits from that investment. An important part of this responsibility is enabling researchers and members of the community to access the data resulting from NHMRC funded projects for the long term and to maximise the benefits that could be derived from the data.

NHMRC acknowledges the importance of making research data publicly accessible and therefore strongly encourages researchers to consider the reuse value of their data and to take reasonable steps to share research data and associated metadata arising from NHMRC supported research.

When sharing data, researchers should ensure that appropriate metadata accompany the datasets. This will allow users of the data to fully understand the data, the curation strategies, assumptions, experimental conditions and any other details relevant to the interpretation of the data. When sharing research data, researchers must also consider the appropriate level of access that they would like to provide to users. The level of access may range from highly restricted (e.g. commercial in confidence, patient level, culturally sensitive, national security) to fully open access.

NHMRC acknowledges that sharing certain types of data may be complex. An example would be sharing of clinical trial data due to the length of clinical trials, the types of data inherent in clinical trials and the governance of the data. NHMRC therefore encourages researchers to share clinical trial data and associated metadata as soon as possible after publication provided that all ethical, regulatory and legal obligations are fulfilled. In order for the data to be of value to other researchers and for proper analyses to be conducted, the analytical techniques, assumptions, software and other details relevant to the clinical trial should also be shared alongside the data.

Researchers who use secondary data must acknowledge the original research team and provide a citation to the data source."

NHMRC Research Data Lifecycle

NHMRC Research Data Lifecycle

 

Figure 1. Research data lifecycle. Reprinted from Open Access Policy - Further Guidance by National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Retrieved January 7, 2019, from https://nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/open-access-policy.

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