In the 11 February 2011 issue, Science and its sister publications present a special collection of papers that explore the challenges associated with improving the collection, curation, and use of research data. To delve deeper into these issues, we polled our peer reviewers from last year and learned that lack of standardization, lack of metadata, and privacy concerns are among the major obstacles. How can we best overcome these challenges or others specific to your field? What role(s) should funding agencies, journals, individual scientists, and society play in the development and maintenance of data archives?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below and in our poll about data use and availability.
