n September 2021, 16 early-career researchers from diverse backgrounds came together to share ideas and discuss current developments related to the topic of consciousness. These discussions were followed by presentations about the EBRAINS research infrastructure and the use of their tools and services.

I was invited to give an introduction into the Data and Knowledge service of the EBRAINS research infrastructure. This service supports researchers in sharing and finding data, models and software.

Despite the session being online, it could still be an interactive session with the use of interactive polls.

What I found out about the attendees was that 50% of the people had shared data or code before. Of the remaining 50%, 80% would be interested in sharing data in the future. There are many reasons to share data, for example to comply with data sharing policies of journals. Interestingly, the majority of the attendees of this talk indicated that they think data should be shared to improve reproducibility (60%), followed by to encourage reuse (30%).

When talking about data sharing we typically also mention the FAIR principles. The FAIR principles focus on making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable and emphasise machine-actionability. Only 30% of the attendees had heard of the FAIR principles before, which is similar to the 28% reported in the 2021 State of OpenData report by Digital Science. The number of researchers familiar with the FAIR principles has been steadily growing over the last 5 years, this number is still quite low. Machine-actionability can only be achieved if metadata (information that accompanies data) is provided in a format that can be read and used by machines. However, ‘human-readable’ metadata is equally important and should therefore not be omitted.

The video of this talk is available on YouTube