How Freely Should Scientists Share Their Data? - Scientific American Blog Network

"At the beginning of graduate school, I decided I wanted to study how epileptic seizures damage the brain. I was in something of a pickle: I wanted to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study this damage, but I didn’t have access to MRI data of patients with epilepsy. Even if I had that data, I didn’t know much about programming or mathematics or physics, so I couldn’t have created ex nihilo the software tools to analyze the data anyway. So, I was driven and energetic and wanted to study epilepsy, but I didn’t have the data or tools to work with. But other people did. With the help of my mentor, I struck up collaborations with groups at the University of Texas at Houston and New York University, who shared high-quality MRI data of patients with epilepsy, free of charge. I corresponded with researchers at Oxford and Harvard to learn how to use their MRI analysis programs, which they also shared free of charge. This model for sharing data and software tools made a deep impression on me. Everyone benefited; I was able to study epilepsy, my collaborators were able to reuse data that was otherwise gathering dust, and we were trying to improve the way we treat patients...."