How to Share Data for Collaboration

ABSTRACT

Within the statistics community, a number of guiding principles for sharing data have emerged; however, these principles are not always made clear to collaborators generating the data. To bridge this divide, we have established a set of guidelines for sharing data. In these, we highlight the need to provide raw data to the statistician, the importance of consistent formatting, and the necessity of including all essential experimental information and pre-processing steps carried out to the statistician. With these guidelines we hope to avoid errors and delays in data analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Analysis
• Data sharing
• Guidelines
• Statistician
• Tidy data

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Jenny Bryan and the referees, Nicholas Horton and Stephen Turner, for their helpful contributions and edits. We would additionally like to thank Foram Ashar, Pat Carlson, Claude Chaunier, Leonardo Collado-Torres, Dan Fowler, David Jankoski, Sean Kross, Gene Miller, Leslie Myint, and Nick Reich for their suggestions and edits.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NIH R01 GM105705.