Table 1.
Countries.
Fig 1.
Countries with more than 20 responses.
The majority of responses came from central Europe and the United States.
Table 2.
Age groups.
Table 3.
Employment role.
Table 4.
Subject disciplines.
Table 5.
Overlap of disciplines in global environmental change research.
Fig 2.
Perceived properties of open data.
The ability to assess the quality, to select based on metadata, and to easily access and (re)use the data were rated as most important (n = 944 to 973 responses).
Fig 3.
Views on licenses for open data.
A “Public Domain” or “Attribution” license were considered most useful for open data (n = 712 to 820 responses).
Fig 4.
Expectations about functionalities of infrastructures.
Core expectations of users of data infrastructure were that attribution information is provided and that data is citable (n = 890 to 911 responses).
Fig 5.
Importance of open data for disciplinary communities.
Four out of five respondents highlighted that open data is crucial for advancing research (n = 853 to 878 responses).
Fig 6.
Motivators to publish data as open data.
The commitment to publish data as open data seems to be driven by research-intrinsic motives, combining general and personal motivations (n = 834 to 861 responses).
Table 6.
Motivators for data managers vs. all other data professionals.
Fig 7.
The release of data was seen as a secondary step compared to publishing results (n = 825 to 854 responses).
Table 7.
Age groups (clustered).
Table 8.
Publishing before releasing data—by age groups.
Fig 8.
Desire to publish before releasing data by age groups.
The willingness to share data share varies across age groups, the 31–35 year-olds expressed a significantly higher desire to publish results before releasing data. Due to the very small number of respondents in some categories the plot does not display all age groups (age < = 20 and >70 are not shown).
Fig 9.
References in journal articles, web search engines and data repositories were identified as the most common discovery routes (n = 774 respondents selected at least one option).
Table 9.
Discovery routes.
Fig 10.
Paying for data as well as varying data quality, standards and formats were considered least acceptable when accessing data (n = 687 to 731 responses).
Fig 11.
Across all countries the acceleration of scientific research and applications, and dissemination and recognition of a researcher’s work were important reasons for sharing data. Funder policies as a motivator stood out in the UK and the U.S.
Table 10.
Motivators by Country.
Table 11.
Barriers by Country.
Table 12.
Countries by continent.