Fig. 1: Summary results from a survey of 306 scientists on data reuse.

A 21-question survey examining the scientific community’s perceptions of data reuse was conducted in January 2024, with the survey distributed through social media, a blog and email to hundreds of scientists and two dozen scientific societies. A total of 306 respondents contributed to the survey. a–d, Responses were summarized for key questions and visualized using Adobe Illustrator, in which the first panel corresponds to questions 15–17 (a), the second panel to questions 20–21 (b), the third panel to questions 9–12 (c) and the fourth panel to questions 7–8 (d) (a descriptive analysis of responses to this survey and anonymous raw data to all questions are available in Supplementary Figs. 2–10 and Supplementary Tables 3–7). N/A indicates the question was left blank. Positive communication was defined as being contacted before data analysis or publication and asked for collaboration and opinion, or a positive answer when you requested data removal from a manuscript. Negative communication was defined as no contact before publication, or refusal to remove data from a manuscript upon request. The asterisk in a indicates that respondents agree or strongly agree that ‘Unauthorized use of my sequence data by other authors has had (or will have) negative impacts on my research programme and/or my mentees’. Respondents selected single-year intervals for the data presented in the hourglass image; years 4–6 and 7–9 were combined given very low proportions for all years except year 5. Notably, respondents did not agree on a time interval after which data should be made available in the absence of an available publication (Supplementary Fig. 7). As a result, our roadmap does not include a recommendation as to when publicly available data with a DRI but no publication can be reused without contacting the data creators (Fig. 2).