Late this August, California became a haven for proponents of data-sharing as the California Digital Library played host to the annual DataCite meeting in Berkeley. DataCite is a non-profit organization which aims to promote the sharing and re-use of research data by helping to provide tools to support a global infrastructure for data archiving, access, and citation. DataCite is composed of an international consortium of libraries, data centers, research institutions.

The keynote speaker, John Wilbanks (Science Commons), kicked off the meeting by describing the new concept of data in the information age and highlighting the types of tools and infrastructure needed to advance this concept, potentially leading to enormous growth in knowledge building capabilities.

Heather Piwowar described some of her research providing quantifiable measures of the benefits to sharing data, including increased visibility of the data generator’s work (via increased citation rate) and favorable returns on investments in data sharing.

Even representatives from various publication outlets are getting in on the data-sharing fervor. Hylke Koers of Elsevier spoke about their effort to develop an ‘Article of the Future‘ which would include links to associated shared applications and data repository materials along with the standard journal article as we are familiar with it.

Many other wonderful speakers described specific projects aimed at supporting a culture of data sharing, and you can learn more about this informative meeting by going to the DataCite website