Opportunities for and Barriers to Engineering Research Data Re-use

A survey of researchers in engineering established that descriptive material (i.e. data that reports on and aids understanding of a situation) had more potential for re-use than prescriptive material (i.e. data used to identify shortcomings in a situation and suggest improvements). The latter may still be useful in validating research conclusions and as a starting point for further prescriptive studies. The major barriers to re-use were found to be confidentiality (amid concerns about anonymity, commercial sensitivity and negative publicity), the importance of data ownership to status in the research community, hardware and software licences, and the use of highly specialized technology. Many of these barriers could be reduced for future research provided they are tackled early in the research process.