From data sharing to knowledge co-creation and evidence-based practice: Advancing military and Veteran health research
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: From data sharing to knowledge co-creation and evidencebased practice: Advancing military and Veteran health researchData sharing is the practice of making research data avail-data sharing while protecting the rights of individable to other researchers, institutions, or the public.It uals.The Canadian Tri-Council statement encourages involves open access to data sets, analyses, and findings, researchers to consider any ethical, legal, and commercial with the goal of promoting transparency, reproducibility, considerations that may limit data sharing and to referand collaboration in research.The concept of data shar-ence international as well as disciplinary best practices.1 ing has become increasingly important in various fields, Canada's military and Veteran population is relaincluding scientific research, health care, and public pol-tively small compared with that of other nations.Thereicy, because of the growing recognition of its potential fore, data sharing presents an invaluable opportunity benefits and the movement toward open science.to enhance evidence-based research in this field while Data sharing enables collaboration, allowing adhering to the SAGER (sex, age, gender, ethnicity, and researchers to pool their expertise, resources, and data race) principles and by including the participation at to tackle complex problems and achieve more signifi-planning tables of people with lived expertise.By poolcant breakthroughs.Canada's "Tri-Agency Statement ing and analyzing data from different sources, researchof Principles on Digital Data Management" requests ers can strengthen the statistical power of studies, that research data from agency funding be preserved identify patterns, and draw more reliable conclusions.in a publicly accessible, secure, and curated repository Collaborative research efforts among government or other platform for discovery and reuse by others. 1 By agencies such as Statistics Canada, National Defence, embracing data-sharing practices, researchers can col-and Veteran Affairs Canada, as well as universities lectively harness the power of shared knowledge to drive with big data technologies, research institutes, hospiinnovation and discovery.tals, rehabilitation centres, and other organizations, Sharing data allows multiple researchers to analyze are essential to advance understanding of military and and interpret much bigger data sets, increasing reliabil-Veteran health issues and those of other related popuity, ensuring data are representative of the population, lations.These partnerships foster innovation, promote and maximizing the value of the information collected.knowledge exchange, and improve the efficiency of This optimizes the use of limited resources and ensures research initiatives.that valuable data are not left under-used.Data sharing Collaborative efforts in research should extend enables meta-analyses, increases statistical power, and beyond data collection and analysis.Health research is leverages the newer computational capacities of machine often plagued by the fabled "valley of death" between learning, big data, and artificial intelligence.2 This is par-science and the implementation of findings in realticularly important for research with under-represented world settings.3 Evidence-based practice, in the form of populations, or small effect sizes, in which individual clinical guidelines or evidence-informed policy making, studies may have limited power to detect significant helps to bridge the divide by rigorously assessing data results and sample size is sometimes so sparse that par-and research for the care of individual patients and comticipants lose their anonymity.Proper de-identification munities.Data sharing and the appropriate pooling of in data sharing further protects the rights and privacy large data sets increases research impact.Government of study participants while enabling the scientific com-partners, research institutes, researchers, and other munity to benefit from shared data.organizations bring together their strengths in dis-To fully realize the potential of data sharing in seminating, translating, and mobilizing research findmilitary and Veteran health research, concerns about ings.Each has a responsibility to ensure that research privacy, security, and intellectual property rights should can achieve the intended purpose and impact.be addressed.Stakeholders can collaborate to establish Data sharing accelerates knowledge co-creation robust data governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, in health research.Joint collaboration among univerand technical infrastructure that promote responsible sities, government scientists, research institutes, and
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413963893