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The past two decades have seen a revolution in digital imaging techniques for capturing gross morphology, offering an unprecedented volume of data for biological research. Despite the rapid increase in scientific publications incorporating those images, the underlying datasets remain largely inaccessible. As the technical barriers to data sharing continue to fall, we face a more intimate, and perhaps more complicated, obstacle to open data – the one in our minds.
The breadcrumbs we leave behind when using our mobile phones—who somebody calls, for how long, and from where—contain unprecedented insights about us and our societies. Researchers have compared the recent availability of large-scale behavioral datasets, such as the ones generated by mobile phones, to the invention of the microscope, giving rise to the new field of computational social science.