There is a growing chorus of voices in the scientific community calling for greater openness in the sharing of raw data that leads to a publication. In this commentary, we discuss the merits of sharing, common concerns that are raised, and practical issues that arise in developing a sharing policy. We suggest that the cognitive science community discuss the topic and establish a data sharing policy.
Science 3.0: Corrections to the “Science 2.0” paradigm
The concept of “Science 2.0” was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing.
Although technically sound, the concept still does not work as expected. Here we provide a systematic line of arguments to modify the concept of Science 2.0, making it more consistent with the spirit and traditions of science and Internet.
Our first correction to the Science 2.0 paradigm concerns the open-access publication models charging fees to the authors. As discussed elsewhere, we reiterate that the monopoly of such publishing models increases biases and inequalities in the representation of scientific ideas based on the author’s income.
Our second correction concerns post-publication comments online, which are all essentially non-anonymous in the current Science 2.0 paradigm.
We conclude that scientific post-publication discussions require special anonymization systems.
We further analyze the reasons of the failure of the current post-publication peer-review models and suggest what needs to be changed in “Science 3.0” to convert Internet into a large “journal club”.”
The case for open computer programs Scientific…
The case for open computer programs :
“Scientific communication relies on evidence that cannot be entirely included in publications, but the rise of computational science has added a new layer of inaccessibility. Although it is now accepted that data should be made available on request, the current regulations regarding the availability of software are inconsistent. We argue that, with some exceptions, anything less than the release of source programs is intolerable for results that depend on computation. The vagaries of hardware, software and natural language will always ensure that exact reproducibility remains uncertain, but withholding code increases the chances that efforts to reproduce results will fail.”
URL : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/nature10836.html
Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to…
Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results :
“Background : The widespread reluctance to share published research data is often hypothesized to be due to the authors’ fear that reanalysis may expose errors in their work or may produce conclusions that contradict their own. However, these hypotheses have not previously been studied systematically.
Methods and Findings : We related the reluctance to share research data for reanalysis to 1148 statistically significant results reported in 49 papers published in two major psychology journals. We found the reluctance to share data to be associated with weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis of no effect) and a higher prevalence of apparent errors in the reporting of statistical results. The unwillingness to share data was particularly clear when reporting errors had a bearing on statistical significance.
Conclusions : Our findings on the basis of psychological papers suggest that statistical results are particularly hard to verify when reanalysis is more likely to lead to contrasting conclusions. This highlights the importance of establishing mandatory data archiving policies.”
URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026828
Sharing and the Creative Economy Culture in the…
Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age :
“In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learnt about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context.”
URL : http://paigrain.debatpublic.net/docs/internet_creation_1-3.pdf
URL : http://www.amazon.com/Sharing-Culture-Economy-Internet-Age/dp/9089643850
Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a suite of copyright-based licenses defining terms for the distribution and re-use of creative works. CC provides licenses for different use cases and includes open content licenses such as the Attribution license (CC BY, used by many Open Access scientific publishers) and the Attribution Share Alike license (CC BY-SA, used by Wikipedia, for example). However, the license suite also contains non-free and non-open licenses like those containing a “non-commercial” (NC) condition.
Although many people identify “non-commercial” with “non-profit”, detailed analysis reveals that significant differences exist and that the license may impose some unexpected re-use limitations on works thus licensed. After providing background information on the concepts of Creative Commons licenses in general, this contribution focuses on the NC condition, its advantages, disadvantages and appropriate scope. Specifically, it contributes material towards a risk analysis for potential re-users of NC-licensed works.
URL : http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=3036
doi: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2189
Linking to Data Effect on Citation Rates in…
Linking to Data – Effect on Citation Rates in Astronomy :
“Is there a difference in citation rates between articles that were published with links to data and articles that were not? Besides being interesting from a purely academic point of view, this question is also highly relevant for the process of furthering science. Data sharing not only helps the process of verification of claims, but also the discovery of new findings in archival data. However, linking to data still is a far cry away from being a “practice”, especially where it comes to authors providing these links during the writing and submission process. You need to have both a willingness and a publication mechanism in order to create such a practice. Showing that articles with links to data get higher citation rates might increase the willingness of scientists to take the extra steps of linking data sources to their publications. In this presentation we will show this is indeed the case: articles with links to data result in higher citation rates than articles without such links. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNX09AB39G.”
URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3618