Exploring the Fences and Gains of Data Sharing Practices: From the Perception of Some States in North East Nigerian Academics

Abstract

This paper provides some of the benefits and challenges making academics to either share or withhold their data sets. Much research concentrates on either information sharing or knowledge sharing of the researchers. For data collection, qualitative method was used and a total of 12 academics participated in an interview observing benefit and hitches of sharing that encourage data sharing activities in an academic atmosphere, the results showed the majority of the interviewees acknowledged the usefulness of data sharing but most of the them are not always ready to comply with the practices to support their colleagues’ data sharing exercises. This current work revealed benefits such as encouraging collaboration reputation and maximize transparency. Unsuitable infrastructure, community- culture, economic and legal challenges are the fences for data sharing. Researchers labelled sharing of data as a crucial portion aim at encouraging scholars’ careers and research improvement.