3 ms·

Biggest factor left out: laziness. I have no philosophical objection to sharing all my raw data just on the offchance somebody wants to look through terabytes

by hugh3 15y ago

Biggest factor left out: laziness. I have no philosophical objection to sharing all my raw data just on the offchance somebody wants to look through terabytes of wavefunction data. But it'd take time and effort to organise it all. It's enough trouble for me just to get the relevant and important bits ready for publication, I don't want to sort through all my raw data as well.

zerostar07 15y ago
Lazyness because there is no incentive. Again, the open source analogy comes handy: I usually write hugely embarrassing code for my projects, but if i had to open source it, not only would i write better, i might actually discover errors hitherto undetected. Equivalently, people would triple-check their data to avoid being embarrassed. That would also signal a shift from the "publish or perish" madness to "just publish good", which is huge.
michael_nielsen 15y ago
This factor is not left out, it's at the core of the article: "Even if you personally think it would be far better for science as a whole if you carefully curated and shared your data online, that is time away from your "real" work of writing papers. Except in a few fields, sharing data is not something your peers will give you credit for doing." There is no question that in most (not all) fields it is not yet in an individual scientist's best interest to spend a lot of time systematically sharing data. The question is: might it sometimes be in the community's best interest? This argument played out, for example, with the human genome in the 1990s, where many scientists were initially reluctant to share data (little individual reward for the time and effort). Ultimately, grant agencies required very early-stage sharing, something almost everyone would agree has benefited science as a whole. The point of the article is that there needs to be a change to bring individual incentives for this kind of systematic sharing into alignment with the community's best interest.
TheEzEzz 15y ago
That's what grad students are for.

by hugh3 15y ago

zerostar07 15y ago

Lazyness because there is no incentive. Again, the open source analogy comes handy: I usually write hugely embarrassing code for my projects, but if i had to open source it, not only would i write better, i might actually discover errors hitherto undetected. Equivalently, people would triple-check their data to avoid being embarrassed. That would also signal a shift from the "publish or perish" madness to "just publish good", which is huge.

michael_nielsen 15y ago

This factor is not left out, it's at the core of the article: "Even if you personally think it would be far better for science as a whole if you carefully curated and shared your data online, that is time away from your "real" work of writing papers. Except in a few fields, sharing data is not something your peers will give you credit for doing." There is no question that in most (not all) fields it is not yet in an individual scientist's best interest to spend a lot of time systematically sharing data. The question is: might it sometimes be in the community's best interest? This argument played out, for example, with the human genome in the 1990s, where many scientists were initially reluctant to share data (little individual reward for the time and effort). Ultimately, grant agencies required very early-stage sharing, something almost everyone would agree has benefited science as a whole. The point of the article is that there needs to be a change to bring individual incentives for this kind of systematic sharing into alignment with the community's best interest.

TheEzEzz 15y ago

That's what grad students are for.