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From: | David De Roure |
Subject: | RE: [Myexperiment-discuss] Scientists sharing data |
Date: | Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:05:40 +0100 |
Hi - Heather Piwowar’s work may be relevant to this discussion –
she gave a really interesting talk at the open science workshop at PSB http://precedings.nature.com/users/a56378f9b7e953b713da4222e8318e54 -- Dave From:
address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Andrea Wiggins On Jun 26, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Leslie Carr <address@hidden> wrote:
On 26 Jun 2009, at 11:57, Jun Zhao
wrote: Find it intriguing, if scientists cannot share their publications
This is even more ironically true for publications about
open access/source/science that are under tight copyright
restrictions. Most publishers permit personal self-archiving, which lets
authors distribute papers from their own web sites, though the papers may have
to be in a pre-print state. It gets very complicated and confusing, very
quickly.
In some ways there is more freedom
for sharing data - for example few Most intellectual property cases cost far more than they are
worth in monetary terms, not to mention time. Corporate entities are typically
the only ones who can afford that sort of battle, and it has to represent a lot
of money to make it worthwhile. Publishing companies claiming copyright to
scientific data can probably only do so if the data are published through them,
or with a paper they published, which is not common practice in most fields. To make things more difficult, the ownership of scientific
data can be unclear, particularly if a data set is longitudinal and has changed
ownership multiple times. Licensing for scientific data doesn't seem to have
gotten the same attention as in other areas - yet - but it's probably coming,
as foreseen by the folks at the Open Data Commons (http://www.opendatacommons.org). It seems reasonable to expect that copyright claims to
scientific data will remain limited for the time being, but the onus lies with
scientists to deposit data in open access repositories that have suitable
preservation plans, if they truly wish to share their data. The choice not to
do so speaks volumes.
Ahem. I'm a librarian. Perhaps your experience holds true in the UK, but it is
emphatically not the case universally. The current practice of librarianship in
the US is far more progressive than the stereotypes suggest, and it's an area
in which the UK simply does not perform well, so I won't hold your vague
accusations of an entire profession against you. :) American library training is much, much broader than just
handling books, and among the only sources of professional education in
scientific data management. Most American librarians are staunchly in
support of open access/data/everything. Librarians and archivists care more
about freedom of information than most people can comprehend. Data librarians are not new or rare. Numeric and spatial
data librarians are common at (US) research universities, and have been helping
researchers share and reuse data for a long, long time. Helping researchers
with shared data is, in fact, the entire purpose of their employment, and they
do it remarkably well. The guild procedures that you may find distasteful are a
mark of professionalism, and usually consist of mechanisms intended to improve
access, preservation, interoperability, and sharing. Yes, metadata standards
and cataloging can be a drag, and none of it is perfect, but these are
critically important functions for sharing and preserving data. These aspects
of data management are historically neglected by researchers themselves, and
therefore trained librarians are a crucial part of maintaining access and
managing data infrastructures. Social curation is simply not enough to maintain
data in perpetuity. I hope you will find reason to reconsider your position on
the role of librarians in managing scientific data. Librarians are among the
few people taking an active role in data preservation and access, because
unlike most scientists, they value sharing information enough to devote their
professional lives to it. By the way, if you want access to that article, I'd suggest
asking a librarian. My library only has that periodical in hard copy, but many
interlibrary loan requests come through as scanned PDFs these days. Cheers, Andrea |
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