As a side note, I talked to a colleague who got harassed at the Ichs and Herps meeting for… gasp… downloading sequences from GenBank and using them without asking the author’s permission! Good lord, what is the world coming to? I’m surprised to hear of such active resistance to public availability of information.
Paulo Nuin pointed to a blog post on Phylota on Friendfeeed earlier today. The post is interesting in itself, but paragraph above, which was an aside on the post, blew my mind away. There was a time when I had the naive opinion that academics were all about the open dissemination of science, especially the sharing of basic scientific data. Alas, it turns out that for some the public domain is not exactly that. I suppose that this is a minority opinion, but it is clear that the confusion about scientific data and ownership needs to be resolved and fast. It should be obvious, but it isn’t and even those of us who should know better get confused. In the above case, if there was a paper where the data source had not been cited properly is understandable, but downloading and using sequences; Yowza!!!
There is a distinction between data and content/information. Too many people have trouble making the distinction and as a result there is confusion the ownership rights around the two. Anyway, this issue isn’t going anywhere soon it seems.
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2 Comments
Thanks for checking out our blog. Yes, I was blown away too, but I guess this is typical of a certain school of thought. The thing is, papers in good journals do not get published because of the amount of “new data” they contain – at least, not at the scale of a few genes from some (admittedly hard to get) species. Hopefully this will pass as new ideas propagate up the academic chain…
Thanks for checking out our blog. Yes, I was blown away too, but I guess this is typical of a certain school of thought. The thing is, papers in good journals do not get published because of the amount of “new data” they contain – at least, not at the scale of a few genes from some (admittedly hard to get) species. Hopefully this will pass as new ideas propagate up the academic chain…