Rethink the way of managing research data

The replicability of research findings is an important quality criterion for increasing the credibility of science. 87 per cent of respondents in the ZBW study about Open Science practices in economics agree with this statement.

Open scientific data make data-based research findings transparent and verifiable. Reuse avoids duplicate work and saves money. Linking different open data sources also enables entirely new research that was unthinkable before. Plus: open data speed up scientific work, as demonstrated by the Ehec epidemic in Germany in 2011. The early sharing of data allowed physicians worldwide to join the fight against the bacterium and its effects. In the fight against the Ebola virus in 2014, 93 scientists from 53 institutions in 16 countries shared different datasets. In 2020, researchers share data and code across disciplines and publish their findings about the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) as soon as possible.

The future is globally distributed and linked-up knowledge.

The ZBW creates infrastructures for research data management in economics.

The increasing importance of empirical work engenders new challenges for scientific infrastructures:

Journals need digital places to store datasets and other materials of empirical articles and make them available for use or for sharing.
Reseachers working empirically must be enabled to publish their replication studies and thus give impetus to their academic career.