Paving the way for greater open science in sports and exercise medicine: navigating the barriers to adopting open and accessible data practices

Abstract

Sport healthcare and performance support practitioners require data to inform clinical and performance decisions, identify risk factors and investigate the efficacy and effectiveness of different interventions. Data sharing is a key component to improve sport healthcare decisions and initiatives, particularly in identifying and tackling systemic health priorities. However, sport healthcare data sharing practices are extremely limited due to little uptake and incentives, which inhibits knowledge growth, evidence synthesis and research progress. Incorporating open science practices into sport healthcare can increase the efficiency and quality of research, transparency, and promote public trust in the research process, results and implementation.

There are many facets to adopting an open science framework with data sharing being a key component (table 1). However, barriers to creating open and accessible data exist and can be operationalised at four levels: (1) individual researcher; (2) publishing (ie, journals); (3) organisational support (ie, universities, sports leagues and governing bodies and grant funding bodies) and (4) governance and security. This editorial aims to contextualise the barriers of open and accessible data in sport health and provide potential solutions which account for the unique culture and environment of sport healthcare and performance providers.