[open-science] Open Science at the British Ecological Society annual meeting

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 15 September 2011 15:25, Ross Mounce <ross.mounce at gmail.com> wrote:

> The key to this is valuing your data being re-used by someone else
> (data citation).
> At the moment people see this re-use as bad [scooping], rather than a
> good thing [my data was re-used, I got a citation for this re-use, win
> for me, win for them, win for science]
>

I think this depends heavily on the nature of the reuse. For meta-analyses
like those you're doing, I expect people wouldn't have a problem with
contributing their dataset, because it's something they're probably not
planning to do themselves. What I think worries people is that someone else
could just pick up their dataset and do the same analyses they want to do.
Also, I think that even people who're happy to share data may feel more
comfortable if re-users have to get in touch with them and request the data,
than if it can just be downloaded freely.

I'd love to see better ways to give credit to people assembling good
datasets (not least because that's what I'm currently trying to do). But I
don't think that's the whole story. Data collection tends to be slow and
tedious, and regardless of the career implications, scientists don't want to
be the one doing the hard graft of collecting data for someone else to do
the relatively interesting work of drawing conclusions. Perhaps ecology is
particularly affected by this - data collection can be particularly slow,
and the statistics are often very complex, which might lead to fears that
someone who knows the stats well will overtake the first researcher on the
analysis.

Thomas
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