Douglas Steinberg, Anatomy Goes Digital, The Scientist, September 22, 2003. Why digitizing and sharing anatomical data is difficult, and what progress is being made to do so. Excerpt: "One difficulty plaguing all computer-based efforts to describe model organisms has been many researchers' reluctance to share data. This problem is 'slowly being resolved,' Koslow contends, because 'people are understanding why it's important to do [that].' Yet he acknowledges that few rewards exist for sharing data or analyzing other investigators' data, and ethical guidelines for sharing are still under discussion.* Another hindrance, says Hall, is that contributing to model-organism Web sites is 'not an accepted way to get recognition' professionally, even though many sites name their contributors. He describes the act of providing data as still 'very much altruistic.'"
* Here Steinberg cites Daniel Gardner et al., Towards Effective and Rewarding Data Sharing (Neuroinformatics, 1, 3, 2003), which is freely available online for users willing to register. When looking for this article online, I found that Neuroinformatics has also produced a very useful bibliography of its Data Sharing Publications and Reports, which is freely available even without registration.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/21/2003 10:23:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
