Principles and Obstacles for Sharing Data from Environmental Health Research Workshop Summary (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Benefits of Data Sharing
3 The Benefits of Data Sharing
Pages 29-38
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From page 29... ...
ADVANCES FROM REPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics and senior associate dean for research at the Harvard University School of Public Health, discussed the importance of advancing science through reproducible research. She explained that a spectrum exists with data sharing: publication is at the low end of the spectrum, the codes and data underlying the published work are in the middle, and full replication of a study is at the highest part of the spectrum.
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From page 30... ...
ALLOWING VERIFICATION OF RESULTS One of the major factors behind the push to share environmental health data is the widespread use of such data to develop environmental regulations. For environmental policy making to be legitimate, the scientific reasoning behind a given decision -- including the data supporting it -- must be transparent.
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From page 31... ...
It goes back to the basic idea of science that people learn in high school or perhaps kindergarten, he said that its results flow from "publicly available, reproducible, everybody-can-stand-around-and-look-at-it data." He said that in his field -- risk analysis -- there is a preference for seeing raw data. When members of professional societies who are engaged in risk analysis were asked, 69 percent said that it was very important to have access to the underlying raw data so that they can form their own conclusions.
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From page 32... ...
That should be the general expectation of good science." THE BENEFITS OF MEGADATA The benefit of having access to tens of thousands of data sets at one time was highlighted by George Daston, a Victor Mills Society Research Fellow at Procter & Gamble, in Session 4 of the workshop. Such "megadata" make it possible to do a variety of analyses that would not be feasible with the amounts of data available from one or a few data sets.
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From page 33... ...
"I think a lot of people are under the impression that the systems biology era has been driven by biotechnology -- and it has been -- but it has even more so been driven by the revolution in computational power." In short, Daston said, the rapidly increasing power of computers has the potential to revolutionize environmental health and toxicology. In particular, he listed several old questions that increasing computational power may make it possible to answer: • What is the relationship between chemical structure and toxicity?
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From page 34... ...
For instance, it is possible to put together a decision tree to help people decide whether a new chemical with a particular chemical structure is likely to have a certain type of toxicity. Daston showed an example of such a decision tree that he and his colleagues put together using data on about 800 developmental toxicants.
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From page 35... ...
"I realize that others have a different calculus from where they sit." COMMENTS AND DISCUSSION Several points related to the importance of data sharing were raised during the workshop. Workshop speakers and participants provided individual remarks that are summarized in this section.
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From page 36... ...
Often, she said, in a systematic review it is necessary to reanalyze at least some of the data in the studies being reviewed, and that is possible only if the original researchers make their data available to other scientists. Gwen Collman, director of the Division of Extramural Research and Training at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, described another class of benefits.
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From page 37... ...
And if EPA had only had the data summaries, none of that would have been discovered." In short, it can sometimes be quite valuable for the scientific community to have access to the raw data. Documenting Data Sharing Dominici noted during the discussion after Session 2 of the workshop that asking or requiring investigators to make their data -- and often their software -- available to other researchers puts a tremendous burden on the investigators.
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From page 38... ...
Presentation at the workshop Principles and Obstacles for Sharing Data from Environmental Health Research, Washington, DC. Ioannidis, J
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