4 ms·

"and along the way they swipe the fMRI community for their “lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices” that prevent most of the discipline's body of work

by maweki 10y ago

"and along the way they swipe the fMRI community for their “lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices” that prevent most of the discipline's body of work being re-analysed." That's quite funny. My girlfriend recently finished her master's thesis on data sharing for neuroscience data and created a model for universal access to research data across institutions, but came to the conclusion that making researchers share their data is a bigger hurdle than actually implementing the system. The main reason for lack of sharing, she postulated, is, that studies (that create funding for the researcher who publishes them) can be done using just the raw data and researchers who create data want to publish all the studies/papers for themselves (because "they" paid for the data acquisition) and are also afraid to publish underlying data for it to be harder for others to falsify their results, which would lead, in their opinion, to funding going away. Edit: of course there are privacy issues for the test subjects as well.

kriro 10y ago
Please ask her to keep working on the problem and keep fighting the good fight. I think it's a political problem. If research grants were only given out if all data was made available (and while we're at it open source all the code produced) we'd be a huge step further down the right path. There is very, very strong resistance to these sort of ideas. The idealist in me likes to think that there shouldn't be much resistance after all scientists should be happy if their results get double checked (for free!). I can only assume that a lot of people are very afraid of having their data double checked (or possibly never had data in the first place). Additionally access to data is a competitive advantage as it's often hard to generate.
brandonl222 10y ago
It's a rather sad reflection of society, no telling how may breakthroughs we're missing out on due to the lack of cooperation in science on this front.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  There is also the motivations of the scanner owner to consider. They are paid to do scans. A cheap scan might be low hundreds of dollars per hour. A more commercial rate would be well into the thousands. We don't want to dry up now do we?
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    Not really. The scanner owners are almost all universities. One typically does have to pay to use the scanner(and quite a bit--$500+ per hour is typical), but this is typically meant to cover the scanner costs. The equipment costs at least four million dollars, plus some ongoing costs (cryogens, typically a full-time tech or two, and maintenance; the power bill is probably not trivial either).
vanderZwan 10y ago
Meanwhile, the research I work for publishes all of their data. In fact, the main reason I have been hired by their professor as a programmer/interaction designer (through HN no less) is because the next project will produce a mountain of data and he does not want it to collect dust after the project is done. I am supposed to make the data even more accessible to other researchers through a web-interface. Aside from the ethical motivations, other benefits are pretty obvious: there is at least one postdoc in the research department that I know of was recruited because he found a completely different use for the data shared in the past and published a paper based on his own analysis. (The research group works with mouse brains so privacy is not an issue)
- a_bonobo 10y ago
  I guess it depends on research field and journal - in biology most journals require you to deposit your raw genomic reads to the Sequence Read Archive, this is still sometimes missed by editors and reviewers. Random example for the requirement of data depositing from Journal of Plant Physiology: "If new sequence data are reported, insert the following: “Sequence data from this article have been deposited at XXX under accession number(s) YY000000.‘‘ http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/jpp_Instruction.pdf http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/jpp_Instruction.pdf Another random example from the Nature Group http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/availability.html http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/availability.html AFAIK only few funding bodies require the deposit of raw data...

by maweki 10y ago

kriro 10y ago

Please ask her to keep working on the problem and keep fighting the good fight. I think it's a political problem. If research grants were only given out if all data was made available (and while we're at it open source all the code produced) we'd be a huge step further down the right path. There is very, very strong resistance to these sort of ideas. The idealist in me likes to think that there shouldn't be much resistance after all scientists should be happy if their results get double checked (for free!). I can only assume that a lot of people are very afraid of having their data double checked (or possibly never had data in the first place). Additionally access to data is a competitive advantage as it's often hard to generate.

brandonl222 10y ago

It's a rather sad reflection of society, no telling how may breakthroughs we're missing out on due to the lack of cooperation in science on this front.

lostlogin 10y ago
There is also the motivations of the scanner owner to consider. They are paid to do scans. A cheap scan might be low hundreds of dollars per hour. A more commercial rate would be well into the thousands. We don't want to dry up now do we?
- mattkrause 10y ago
  Not really. The scanner owners are almost all universities. One typically does have to pay to use the scanner(and quite a bit--$500+ per hour is typical), but this is typically meant to cover the scanner costs. The equipment costs at least four million dollars, plus some ongoing costs (cryogens, typically a full-time tech or two, and maintenance; the power bill is probably not trivial either).

vanderZwan 10y ago

Meanwhile, the research I work for publishes all of their data. In fact, the main reason I have been hired by their professor as a programmer/interaction designer (through HN no less) is because the next project will produce a mountain of data and he does not want it to collect dust after the project is done. I am supposed to make the data even more accessible to other researchers through a web-interface. Aside from the ethical motivations, other benefits are pretty obvious: there is at least one postdoc in the research department that I know of was recruited because he found a completely different use for the data shared in the past and published a paper based on his own analysis. (The research group works with mouse brains so privacy is not an issue)

a_bonobo 10y ago
I guess it depends on research field and journal - in biology most journals require you to deposit your raw genomic reads to the Sequence Read Archive, this is still sometimes missed by editors and reviewers. Random example for the requirement of data depositing from Journal of Plant Physiology: "If new sequence data are reported, insert the following: “Sequence data from this article have been deposited at XXX under accession number(s) YY000000.‘‘ http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/jpp_Instruction.pdf http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/jpp_Instruction.pdf Another random example from the Nature Group http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/availability.html http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/availability.html AFAIK only few funding bodies require the deposit of raw data...