An edited version of a snippet from my upcoming book, The Effective Scientist (due out in March 2018).
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I tend to assume tacitly that my collaborators are indeed entirely fine with the idea of having their hard-won data spread across the internet, and that anyone can access and use them. In reality, many are probably not comfortable with that concept at all, and that the very notion of ‘sharing’ data with anyone but your closest and most-trusted colleagues is the stuff of nightmares.
I too was once far too concerned about the privacy of the data for which I had literally sweated and bled, for I feared that some nefarious and amoral scientist would steal, analyse, and publish them before I had the chance, thus usurping my unique contributions to the body of human knowledge. Perhaps I was just paranoid, although I still encounter such attitudes today. While data theft can occur, in reality it is unlikely that anyone would bother trying to out-do you in this regard, mainly for the simple reason that in most cases, data availability is not the limiting factor for scientific advancement. Another reason why this should not worry you is that far too few of us have the time to publish all of our own data, let alone someone else’s. Read the rest of this entry »
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