Open data sharing is increasingly required by funders and journals. The Charité has signed the Berlin Declaration and - through the EUHA - the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights, which support the open sharing of research data.

At the Charité, the proportion of publications for which research data has been shared via repositories is steadily increasing, but is still only 10% for articles published in 2023. An important motivation for sharing data is transparency and accessibility as part of Good Scientific Practice. Even more important, however, is the potential that research data has for subsequent use by others.

The value of shared data for biomedical research was demonstrated by the pandemic more clearly than ever before. This potential has also been recognized on the political level by the EU and the German government, leading to large-scale projects such as EOSC and NFDI, already before the pandemic. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of publicly visible examples of where and how concretely shared data from Charité researchers have been reused by others and thus led to new scientific knowledge.

The QUEST Open Data Contributor Award aims to recognize researchers who have shared valuable datasets which have been reused by others, and thus also to give more visibility to this practice.

Prerequisites...

  • ...regarding the reused dataset itself

    The dataset has been shared in accordance with Open Data-LOM's criteria for open data, i.e.:

    • the data was generated by the applicant or team members
    • the data is machine-readable raw data o the data was shared either openly or - in the case of personal data - with restricted access via a defined access path through a repository
    • either a persistent identifier or an accession code has been assigned by the repository to the dataset
    • if the repository provides the possibility to indicate authors of the dataset, the applicant must have been named
  • ...regarding reuse
    • the reused dataset provides a substantial basis for the publication (e.g., a meta-analysis with >50 reused datasets would not be sufficient)
    • the reused dataset is cited as a source in the article; alternatively, a reference to an article written by the applicant rather than to the dataset itself is sufficient, provided that it is explicitly stated that data were reused, and the referenced article in turn clearly refers to the dataset
    • the reused dataset is used as such, and not to answer a meta-research question (e.g., whether available datasets from a particular discipline are well structured)
    • the Charité researchers who shared the data are not co-authors of the study
    • if the article in which the data are reused is not open access, the article must be sent alongside the application in order to evaluate the submission
  • ...regarding eligibility

    Not eligible for the award are: 

    • Software packages
    • Data that has been deposited in a non-persistent way in Github or other platforms (i.e., the data creators could delete it at any time)
    • Databases with data sets that were not generated by the applicants themselves, or with pure metadata
    • Statistical values that have been used in meta-analyses

Information for your application

  • The QUEST center is offering this award of 1,000 € to first/last/corresponding BIH or Charité authors (and employees) for papers in which the replication of own results or the results of others is attempted.
  • Papers published in the last two years are accepted (this includes the whole year – e.g., for a submission in March 2025, all articles published in 2023, 2024, or 2025 are eligible).
  • Prizes can be spent until the end of 2027. Awards are given on an ongoing basis.
  • Only one QUEST Prize can be awarded per publication.
  • Authors can apply (with different publications) only once per year per prize (i.e. maximum 5 prizes per year per author).
  • Publications of authors (independent of the author´s position) which are also QUEST employees cannot be considered.
  • Awardees will be featured on the QUEST web pages.

To apply for the award, please fill out the registration form that you can find here. 

Awarded publications

  • Awarded publications

    The publication Robust methylation-based classification of brain tumours using nanopore sequencing receives a QUEST Open Data Contributor Award. The authors had shared an eponymous dataset in the Gene Expression Omnibus repository alongside the article publication. This dataset of nanopore-sequenced human brain tumor samples was then used in a study by Vermeulen et al., published in Nature in 2023, to validate a newly developed ultra-fast tool, which allows tumor classification during surgery. In addition, the authors had shared further datasets in the European Genome-Phenome Archive (e.g. EGAS00001006540) and had themselves built on publicly available data (PRJEB23027, ERR194147)." The article was published in the journal Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology (DOI: 10.1111/nan.12856). Applicant: Philipp Euskirchen, Department of Neuropathology, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Contact

QUEST Center

E-mail:
quest[at]bih-charite.de