"My Data, Your Data, Our Data"
by Amy Dockser Marcus

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...


"In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, it is hard to believe there is still one group that prefers to be more circumspect about sharing: scientists."

"Scientists worry that if they share data before publishing their findings, someone else might claim credit for a discovery they made. And even after they mine information for themselves, they frequently cling to the notion that more may be discovered, and so continue to hoard the data."

"Data is what scientists use to establish their reputation," says Thomas A. Finholt, a research professor and associate dean for research and innovation at University of Michigan. "There is no incentive for opening up access."

"Now an ambitious project has been launched to try to change this traditional approach. Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit with offices at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, is driving an effort to build an open-source collaborative effort it calls Sage Commons, a place where data and disease models can be shared in the hopes of deepening scientists' understanding of disease biology. To succeed, its founders acknowledge, will require not just data, but a huge cultural shift."

...

"The National Institutes of Health and many scientific journals require researchers to put data accompanying published papers in public databases. But when Dr. Quackenbush went through tumor samples and other data stored in those public repositories, he found many scientists "live up to the letter of the law but not the spirit." He says data were annotated with the minimum information to get into the database, making it very difficult to use."

...

"Many of the of the scientists agree it will be increasingly difficult for their colleagues to resist cultural forces that insist on more sharing. "My son is 4. By the time he's 15, his genomic data will probably be on Facebook," Dr. Quackenbush says. "The way people handle their own data in their private lives will change the way researchers share data. If patients demand their data be shared, scientists almost have no choice."

Full Article at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...