This book shows how the vision for open access to scientific data can be more readily achieved through a staged model that research funders, policy makers, scientists, and research organizations can adopt in their practice. Drawing on her own experiences with data processing, on early findings with open scientific data at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and from case studies of shared clinical trial data, the author updates our understanding of research data - what it is; how it dynamically evolves across different scientific disciplines and across various stages of research practice; and how it can, and indeed should, be shared at any of those stages. The result is a flexible and pragmatic path for implementing open scientific data.