Wellcome trials Research Data Support services with Springer Nature

Wellcome is partnering with Springer Nature on a pilot to support researchers to make their research datasets discoverable and available to the wider research community.

The pilot, expected to run over six to twelve months, will see Wellcome support the costs associated with its funded researchers using Springer Nature’s Research Data Support services for an initial fixed number of datasets.

The pilot is open for datasets underpinning research articles from Wellcome-funded studies and from researchers at Wellcome-funded institutes, and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Data can be associated with a submission or publication to any peer-reviewed journal, and is not limited to Springer Nature journals;  authors will remain in control of their data, including choice of Creative Commons license which ensure datasets are open access and available for re-use. As part of the pilot, Wellcome and Springer Nature will also work with Wellcome Open Research, Wellcome’s publishing platform.

David Carr, Programme Manager for Open Research at Wellcome, said: “Wellcome is committed to working with our researchers to help them maximise the value of the data generated by the research we support – ensuring it is managed, described and shared in ways that make it easy to discover and re-use.   Our goal with this pilot is to garner researchers’ interest in and feedback on this kind of service, and its value in terms of enhancing visibility and use of the data.”

Grace Baynes, Vice-President, Data & New Product Development in Springer Nature’s Open Research Group, said: “We know that many researchers face challenges in organising and sharing their data, and we’ve developed our Research Data Support services in response to these challenges.  We’re very pleased to be working with Wellcome, who have pioneered open science over the past fifteen years. Coupling policy, funding and practical support will be key to making data sharing and good data practice the status quo. Partnering with the research community to build collaborative solutions is central to our approach to research data, and we expect to learn a lot through this pilot.”

As a global charitable foundation and funder of research, Wellcome is strongly committed to maximising the value of research outputs. Wellcome’s policy requires data and original software underpinning research publications to be made available to other researchers at the point of publication.  The policy also emphasises that research outputs should be discoverable, have persistent identifiers, and be deposited in recognised community repositories.

Springer Nature is committed to helping researchers take open approaches to their data wherever possible.  The publisher encourages researchers to ensure any data and other materials underpinning research articles are discoverable and useable through a suitable repository, rather than being hidden in supplementary files. This approach is supported by Springer Nature standardised journal data policies, a publicly accessible recommended repositories list, and a free helpdesk providing advice to authors.

If you are a researcher who receives funding from the Wellcome and would like to use the Springer Nature Research Data Support services you can find out how to submit your data here.