I was looking through the website of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council the other day looking for policies on data sharing and open access. You can find the whole policy here but here are the edited highlights;

…BBSRC is committed to getting the best value for the funds we invest and believes that helping to make research data more readily available will reinforce open scientific enquiry and stimulate new investigations and analyses…

…BBSRC expects research data generated as a result of BBSRC support to be made available with as few restrictions as possible in a timely and responsible manner to the scientific community for subsequent research…In line with the BBSRC Statement on Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice, data should also be retained for a period of ten years after completion of a research project…

Ten years? I wonder how many UK scientists really work to that standard in practise (and I don’t include ‘I know its around here somewhere…’)?

…BBSRC supports the view that those enabling sharing should receive full and appropriate recognition by funders, their academic institutions and new users for promoting secondary research…

…BBSRC reserves the right to implement a more prescriptive approach to data sharing for research initiatives…

There are also detailed guidance notes and a FAQ for those who want to follow up.

The focus here is really on large coherent data sets rather than aggregating or indexing diffuse sets of online notebooks that I am more interested in. However I am in the process of writing some proposals that I want to embed an Open Notebook Science approach into so it will be interesting to see what the referees comments come back looking like on those. All proposals to BBSRC since April this year have had to have a section on ‘Data Sharing’ that explicitly includes published and unpublished data.