Freeing and Forgetting Data With Science Commons

blackbearnh writes "Scientific data can be both hard to get and expensive, even if your tax dollars paid for it. And if you do pay the big bucks to a publisher for access to a scientific paper, there's no assurance that you'll be able to read it, unless you've spent your life learning to decipher them. That's the argument that John Wilbanks makes in a recent interview on O'Reilly Radar, describing the problems that have led to the creation of the Science Commons project, which he heads. According to Wilbanks, scientific data should be easy to access, in common formats that make it easy to exchange, and free for use in research. He also wants to see standard licensing models for scientific patents, rather than the individually negotiated ones now that make research based on an existing patent so financially risky." Read on for the rest of blackbearnh's thoughts. "Wilbanks also points of that as the volume of data grows from new projects like the LHC and the new high-resolution cameras that may generate petabytes a day, we'll need to get better at determining what data to keep and what to throw away. We have to figure out how to deal with preservation and federation because our libraries have been able to hold books for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. But persistence on the web is trivial. Right? The assumption is well, if it's meaningful, it'll be in the Google cache or the internet archives. But from a memory perspective, what do we need to keep in science? What matters? Is it the raw data? Is it the processed data? Is it the software used to process the data? Is it the normalized data? Is it the software used to normalize the data? Is it the interpretation of the normalized data? Is it the software we use to interpret the normalization of the data? Is it the operating systems on which all of those ran? What about genome data?'"

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Re:What's the goal, really?

[smallfries]

Trickle-down. Dissemination of knowledge.

You don't know it yet (not meant as a jibe but it is something that clicks in after your PhD) but your primary function as a scientist is not to make discoveries. It is spreading knowledge. Sometimes that dissemination will occur in a narrow pool, through journal papers between specialists in that narrow pool of talent.

This is not the primary goal of science, although it can seem like it when you are slogging away at learning your first specialisation well enough to get your doctorate. Occasionally a wave from that little pool will splash over the side - maybe someone will write a literature review that is read by a specialist in another field. A new idea will be found - after all sometimes we know the result before we know the context that it will be applied to.

The pools get bigger as you move further downstream. Journal articles pass into conference publications, then into workshops. Less detail but carried through a wider audience. Then after a time, when the surface seems to have become still textbooks are written and the knowledge is passed on to another generation. We tend to stick around and help them find the experience to use it as well. This is why all PhD students have an advisor to point out the best swimming areas.

That was the long detailed answer to your question. The simple version is that you don't know who your target audience is yet. And limiting it to people in institutions that pay enormous access fees every year is not science. As a data-point - a lot of European institutes don't bother with IEEE fees. They run to about £50k/year which simply isn't worth it. As a consequence results published in IEEE venues are cited less in Europe. So even amongst the elite access walls have an effect.