Give, and It Will Be Given to You | Science Careers

"In 2007, quantitative ecologist Karthik Ram sought to find out why certain insect parasites appeared in some sand dunes but not others. Ram, who was a graduate student at the time, thought that asking scientists for field data used in the papers they published was no big deal. But the scientists he e-mailed ignored his requests, so Ram, then at the University of California (UC), Davis, had to collect extra insect samples. Later, as he studied how climate change was impacting vegetative growth as a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, Ram found that colleagues weren’t willing to hand over the raw measurements behind published data, or the algorithms that supported the authors’ conclusions. So, Ram spent a year reproducing the data sets so he could use them in his analyses ... Seven years on, the practice of science is becoming more open, and a culture of sharing preprints, data sets, and scientific code is spreading. Ram—one of the pioneers—is prodding and enabling that shift. In 2011, he and his colleagues created rOpenSci, a platform and repository that boasts dozens of open-source data-and-analysis packages serving fields ranging from climate science to vertebrate biology via human genetics. Today, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded the project, which operates out of U.C. Berkeley, a second round of funding, bringing its total funding to $481,000 ..."