ABSTRACT

There is considerable effort and cost associated with making data FAIR, and generally speaking, recreating data that may exist somewhere else is a waste of public resources. Data stewards should be regarded as being essential expert colleagues already in the design phase of any study. In social sciences and humanities, the tendency to reuse data that had been created earlier, in all kinds of surveys and increasingly, of course, from sources such social media, may be already somewhat more established. Reference datasets become more and more important when relatively large new datasets are generated and need interpretation. Several datasets, and, in particular, reference data resources may be available in different formats. Reference datasets can be very important for interpretation, review, and reproducibility of other people's experiments and results. An increasing challenge is that with increased reuse of valuable datasets and cohorts, reuse beyond the original consent, is more and more frequent.