> People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a

> People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a general way While I agree that this is a problem in the current copyright law, there is still a way for researchers to "circumvent" this copyright restriction without violating the scientific principle of independent verifiability that I outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720: Let's say that the data is generally distributed by the owner in a standard format, say, a zip archive, which we will name foo.zip here (for simplicity). If you can't distribute the data itself, you write into your research paper a short explanation of the license terms that disallow the distribution of foo.zip. But you also add a notice what the SHA256 sum of foo.zip is. If some person who has also access to the data (say, from another university) has interest that the research result can be checked independently, they will leak foo.zip somewhere (I can imagine that sci-hub would be willing to provide server space for this). This way access for independent verifiers can be "assured" without the original researchers having to violate copyright law.