It was not that long ago that the World Bank opened up its data banks to users. Since that momentous day, the Bank has been swamped by users, all keen to use the data - so much so that traffic to the data site now dwarfs traffic to the Bank's home page, according to Aleem Walji, practice manager of World Bank Institute's innovation team.

Cloud solutions to research data sharing seem to be popping up all over the Web.

Data repositories allow researchers to preserve and share research data over the long term. We aim to showcase a different data repository each week to raise awareness of these services.

The Council of Australian University Librarians has an Open Scholarship initiative (COSI for short).

The 2007 paper by Heather Piwowar "Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate" posited that data sharing would help boost a researcher's profile.

Ten Tales of Drivers & Barriers in Data Sharing is a collection of success stories and lessons learned about data sharing, re-use and data preservation.

In the US, 2.5 petabytes of data are stored annually just for mammograms.

The volume of earth-observation data from the European Space Agency's satellites passed three petabytes in 2007. The projection for 2020? A seven-fold rise.

Knowledge Exchange's A Surfboard for Riding the Wave report calls for a collaborative data infrastructure to enable researchers to use, re-use and exploit research data to benefit scientific research, and society more generally.