The notion of open-source scientific discovery is a good one, but some of the suggestions here seem very unlikely to catch much traction, and even if they do, p

The notion of open-source scientific discovery is a good one, but some of the suggestions here seem very unlikely to catch much traction, and even if they do, problems will remain. For example, say an academic chemical research group synthesizes a series of novel compounds in the lab - they're not going to just release the raw data on everything they did immediately. The thinking might be, 'we can give this MS student this compound to work out a better synthesis route for, or this pHD student can try to extend the synthesis and make other compounds'. A more realistic scenario mentioned in the article would be to require publication of the raw data to a database as a condition of publication. This is already done to some extent in journals, but materials and methods sections are notorious for leaving out some key factor or other, meaning repeatability is an issue and other labs will generally only try to replicate the more interesting results (possible new antibiotic, etc.). This worked out fairly well with GenBank, the database of published gene sequences, and also with the protein crystallography databases, but everyone in the molecular biology world knows that all sequence data is not of the same quality, and so cross-referencing by the more reputable researchers and reading their papers to see if their methods are transparent and robust or not is still an important step. A database clogged with low-quality data isn't as valuable as a more carefully curated one, certainly. It would be nice though, to have a database where you could look up everything there is to know about something like the antibiotic ciproflaxin, including all the spectral identification data, optimal reaction conditions, etc. - but this is also a molecule that researchers are busy making derivatives of, likely with the hopes of patenting some novel new knockoff and getting an exclusive license distribution deal with a major pharma corp, and so they won't be releasing any data, or even publishing in a timely manner (at least not until the patent application goes through, and maybe not even then). That leads to a controversial question: should research universities and academics financed by taxpayers behave like for-profit startups pitching to a VC outfit?