Embracing data preservation, sharing, and re-use in traumatic stress research

This editorial argues that it is time for the traumatic stress field to join the growing international movement towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable (FAIR) research data, and that we are well-positioned to do so. The field has a huge, largely untapped resource in the enormous number of rich potentially re-usable datasets that are not currently shared or preserved. We have several promising shared data resources created via international collaborative efforts by traumatic stress researchers, but we do not yet have common standards for data description, sharing, or preservation. And, despite the promise of novel findings from data sharing and re-use, there are a number of barriers to researchers’ adoption of FAIR data practices. We present a vision for the future of FAIR traumatic stress data, and a call to action for the traumatic stress research community and individual researchers and research teams to help achieve this vision.