[okfn-discuss] Businesses unwilling to share data, but keen on government doing it

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Mr. Puneet Kishor <punkish at eidesis.org>wrote:

>
> On Jun 30, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>
> > "A survey of 1,000 businesses finds that they're keen on open data
> > initiatives from the government - but unwilling to follow suit"
> >
> >
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/29/business-data-sharing-unwilling
> >
>
> Makes sense. Speaking for myself, public's data should be public. Private
> users and creators of data should have the freedom to make their private
> data public or keep it private without any censure or judgment from others.
>

I take a different view.  I've worked in the pharma industry trying to
design drugs and it's desperately ineffective. Much of the problem is that
we do not have the appropriate knowledge on which to take decisions. But
much of that knowledge resides - fragmented - within the industry. And it
occurs multiple times.

The first consequence is that the whole industry is  less effective that it
could be (this is a personal judgment but I can defend it). I believe that
by raising the pre-competitive level and publishgin basic data that benefits
everyone, then everyone benefits. It's almsot a classic prisoner's dilemma
but with an added act of faith and a less clear benefit for defecting.

If it were simply that the industry is less profitable that's a pity for the
shareholders. But it's worse than that because it leads to bad drugs. Most
drugs have serious problems - they don't work for some people, they are
toxic to others, etc. And the culture of secrecy inevitable leads to suspect
practices (some may even be unconscious).

So IMO there is a public interest in pharma companies being more Open. To
their credit Merck started this my making their ESTs public (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag, ) - see
http://www.abrf.org/abrfnews/1997/june1997/jun97mining.html . ...

The initial success of the NIH group spawned additional large scale EST
projects, both in industry and academia. Biotechnology companies, such as
Human Genome Sciences and Incyte, were founded on the power of large scale
EST sequencing and its potential value for drug discovery. Many of these
large industrial efforts took a proprietary approach to EST data, eventually
leading to the Merck-sponsored EST project at Washington University
described below (3). The Merck and other academic EST projects have produced
an excellent public database of short cDNA tags which currently represent
approximately 55,000 unique human genes (4). This database is a powerful
resource for the identification and study of human disease genes. It further
provides effective tools for mapping, complete sequencing and comprehensive
analysis of the human genome.

Historians will argue what would have happened to the genome projects if the
companies had kept it all to themselves. I've copied in Tim Hubbard who will
be able to give chapter and verse.

There is now a movement within the pharma industry to start raising the
pre-competitive level. They recognise the prisoner's dilemma. It's early
days and mechanisms are yet to be worked out but I hope we will start to see
a freer and therefore more innovative approach to knowledge-driven drug
discovery.

And it's certain that to be effective that knowledge must be Open.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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