It is not enough that we require data to be shared; we have to make sharing easy, feasible and accessible too!

The sharing of health data, including clinical trial data, is required more and more often by research publishers, regulatory agencies, ethics committees and funding bodies. Despite these requirements, there are currently no clear standards and guidelines of how, where and when researchers should share their data. The confusion among researchers regarding issues related to data sharing has led funders such as The European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) to devise initiatives that will provide their grantees, and the wider scientific community within the field of global health research, with clear guidance and a range of tools to facilitate the data sharing process. In an effort to support and facilitate data sharing, the EDCTP is working in collaboration with The Global Health Network to assess whether a cross-cutting knowledge hub around data sharing would help researchers find the optimum repository and to gather their data in a form that is ready for sharing.