19 Later stages of the research response are ongoing and involve investigations into viral pathogenesis, the animal reservoir species and spillover factors, transmission dynamics, the efficacy of known antiviral drugs and the development and testing of vaccines by stringent regulatory authorities. An effective research response requires the sharing of many types of data, ranging from surveillance and epidemiological information, risk assessments, healthcare facility and emergency management information, observational and experimental studies, clinical trials, viral and patient genomic data. Garnering insights into the data sharing practices relating to the research response to Ebola therefore necessitates engaging a wide range of stakeholders, including community leaders, clinicians, infectious disease specialists, public health authorities, government officials and vaccine developers. Such engagement provides the broadest possible picture of formal and informal data sharing practices through bilateral and multilateral arrangements, between multiple stakeholders at the local, national and international levels. The data sharing practices associated with the Ebola research response was plagued by many of the same problems encountered during other public health emergencies. Legal and ethical problems associated with patient privacy and informed consent, lack of professional norms around data sharing, uncertainty about which parties are responsible for sharing certain data and who should bear the associated costs of data curation and maintenance, intellectual property considerations of commercial parties, pressure to publish in scientific journals before data is released to the public, technical barriers associated with appropriately disseminating and securing the data, as well as concerns about data reliability and suitability. 4 There were also data sharing issues that were specific to the response to Ebola because the development of therapeutics and vaccines depended upon idiosyncratic relationships between military funders, public research laboratories, small entrepreneurial biomedical firms, and large pharmaceutical firms with networks and capabilities to work with governmental or military partners. c. Background to this Report: This report was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to analyse the data sharing practices of multiple stakeholders during the response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak. This case study of data sharing for a public health emergency caused by a known pathogen without a licensed intervention will be used to better understand the barriers and enablers to data sharing and how these inform the research response to such outbreaks. The report team conducted 26 semi-structured interviews ranging between 11 and 67 minutes in duration. Two interviewees preferred to respond to written questions provided via email. Most of the interviewees were identified from media coverage of the Ebola outbreak and applicable scientific literature including scholars and researchers contributing to a volume edited by one of the case study authors. Additional interviewees were identified during the interview process. Interviewees were from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and United States of America, representing a wide range of stakeholders including public health officials, government representatives, virologists, members of the World Health Organization, hospital-based researchers, public health researchers, and representatives from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Before the interviews took place, interviewees were sent a list of the question categories to be covered in the interviews. Consent was sought from the interviewees and their responses and quotes are de-identified in this report. In some instances, the observations of interviewees have been augmented with reports from the news media and scientific literature.1 As per the terms of the project, this report focuses on issues of data sharing in the research response to Ebola, that is epidemiological, surveillance (clinical, laboratory), emergency response, health facility data, pathogen genome data, research data including surveys, qualitative and quantitative data from social science and humanities research, observational studies, clinical trials of diagnostics, therapeutics and preventives, quality controlled interim results, final research results, ancillary research results, ‘negative’ and inconclusive results. ‘Stakeholders’ are defined as those involved with the research and public health response to outbreaks, including clinical and public health researchers (including virologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, and epidemiologists among others), social science scholars, clinicians, funders, politicians, modellers, non-governmental organisations and humanitarian organisations, and public health bodies. 1 This study was approved as exempt by Georgetown University’s Institutional Review Board. 5 The key themes identified in these interviews have been grouped in this report to cover the barriers to data sharing during the Ebola outbreak (what did not work well during the outbreak), the enablers of effective data sharing (what worked well), and the opportunities for improvement for future public health emergencies (what was learned from the Ebola