Slashdot Mirror
Major Scientific Journal Publisher Requires Public Access To Data
An anonymous reader writes "PLOS — the Public Library of Science — is one of the most prolific publishers of research papers in the world. 'Open access' is one of their mantras, and they've been working to push the academic publishing system into a state where research isn't locked behind paywalls and subscription services. To that end, they've announced a new policy for all of their journals: 'authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article.' The data must be available within the article itself, in the supplementary information, or within a stable, public repository. This is good news for replicating experiments, building on past results, and science in general."
It would be nice to see this result in pressure on other publishers to require similar access to data backing the papers in their journals.
And not just the data that was cherry-picked to support the hypothesis?
Open data is a great idea but it is not always practical. Particle physics experiments generate petabytes of extremely complex, hard to understand data. Making this publicly accessible is extremely expensive and ultimately useless since, unless you understand the innards of the detector and how it responds to particles and spend the time to really understand the complex analysis and reconstruction code there is nothing useful that you can do with the data. In fact one of the previous experiments I worked on went to great trouble to put their data online in a heavily processed and far easier to understand format in the hope that theorists or interested members of the public would look at the data. IIRC they got about 10 hits on the site per year and 1 access to the data.
So I agree with the principle that the public should be able to access all our data but for experiments with massive, complex datasets there needs to be a serious discussion about whether this is practical given the expense and complexity of the data involved. Do we best serve the public interest if we spend 25% of our research funding on making the data available to a handful of people outside the experiments with the time, skills and interest to access it given that this loss in funds would significantly hamper the rate of progress?
Personally I would regard data as something akin to a museum collection. Museums typically own far more than they can sensibly display to the public and so they select the most interested items and display these for all to see. Perhaps we should take the same approach with scientific data. Treat it as a collection of which only the most interesting selections are displayed to/accessible by the public even though the entire collection is under public ownership.