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Published online 9 September 2009 | Nature 461, 160-163 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461160a
News Feature
Data sharing: Empty archives
Most researchers agree that open access to data is the scientific ideal, so what is stopping it happening? Bryn Nelson investigates why many researchers choose not to share.
In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores — just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce. Six months of research and marketing had convinced the university that a publicly accessible online archive would be well received.
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This article unhelpfully ignores the distinction between research publications and research data. arxiv.org is full of the former but empty of the latter, and most Institutional Repositories have been set up to capture the former and are starting to turn their attention to the challenges of the latter.
here is a link to a recent article that espouses a future of open science. the article focuses on articles rather than data, and emphasizes that scientists need incentives in the form of "new metrics that acknowledge online collaboration as a genuine scientific
contribution" before they will contribute, share, request help, and collaborate in an open online setting:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/38904