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Yes, medical data is expensive and hard to obtain. But that's not (at least in the direct sense) the reason why so many medical researchers want to keep the dat
by etangent 11y ago
Yes, medical data is expensive and hard to obtain. But that's not (at least in the direct sense) the reason why so many medical researchers want to keep the data to themselves.
The actual reason is that there is a whole cottage industry based on trading access to data for paper co-authorship. If the researchers were to share their data openly, the person who comes after them would be able to just cite the data without having to beg the researcher for access while promising him/her a sweet co-authorship spot in return.
- _delirium 11y agoIn CS (which is admittedly quite different), one counterbalancing incentive is that citations are at least as important as coauthorships in recent years, and releasing data is one relatively easy way to get a boost in citations. If you just release results, then people only cite your paper if they're doing particularly related work. But if you also release an accompanying dataset, all sorts of random people will cite this paper as the source of the data (if the data is interesting, anyway), even if they don't care about the paper itself.
- bachmeier 11y ago> The actual reason is that there is a whole cottage industry based on trading access to data for paper co-authorship. Is that a problem? That's the way it should be. Requiring that the data be shared does not rule out a requirement that the person that creates the dataset is automatically a coauthor.