October 10, 2009

Scientific data sharing

I’ve been posting recently about some issues in scientific data management. One topic I haven’t addressed yet is policies around data sharing. Generally:

On the other hand, it’s blindingly obvious that the world as a whole would be better off with widespread scientific data sharing, provided that making data “free” doesn’t significantly undermine scientists’ incentives to capture it in the first place. And institutions such as funding agencies are taking note. Thus:

Scientific data management technology should be suitable for either of the scenarios:

Biologists, it seems are furthest along in sharing data. But they’ve had some drama about that recently. My very incomplete knowledge includes:

Nature Magazine seems to have had a recent issue focused on data sharing.  My favorite link from that page is this comment thread.

Comments

7 Responses to “Scientific data sharing”

  1. Issues in scientific data management | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on October 10th, 2009 1:21 am

    […] Scientific data sharing Categories: Analytic technologies, Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Facebook and Cassandra, Hadoop, Open source, SciDB, Scientific research, Specific users  Subscribe to our complete feed! […]

  2. Daniel Lemire on October 10th, 2009 11:19 am

    I must point out that your discussion is American-centric whereas it shouldn’t. If the UK (say) funding agencies require data sharing (and they do), this changes the game for everyone, including the Americans. I don’t see people sharing the data just “nationally”.

    As an aside, I recently wrote a book chapter which has some relevance here:

    On the Challenges of Collaborative Data Processing
    http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0910

    In this chapter, we ask “collaborative text editing lead to Wikipedia, where can collaborative data processing lead?”

    At the very least, I feel that we are asking the right question. (As to answering it, it gets tougher.)

  3. Loose coupling and biopharma on October 14th, 2009 2:29 am

    […] Scientific data sharing (dbms2.com) […]

  4. Don McIntosh on October 14th, 2009 9:51 pm

    I agree with Daniel Lemire that this should very much be a global issue, although many of the response are indeed inevitably going to be nationally based. You can check out the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) to find out about a very large initiative in this area that is happening in my part of the world. http://ands.org.au/about-ands.html

  5. The disconnect in funding data resources on October 18th, 2009 2:26 pm

    […] Scientific data sharing (dbms2.com) […]

  6. Bioinformatics and mythology. You still need to manage the data on December 9th, 2009 11:43 pm

    […] Scientific data sharing (dbms2.com) […]

  7. Funding biological data resources revisited on December 15th, 2009 1:49 am

    […] Scientific data sharing (dbms2.com) […]

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