Set the data free, for a price | Pizza, beer and science

"We publish papers to let the world know what we found, but those paper are summaries of the data. Unless we put our data in a place where anyone can access it those data may be lost forever. By making our data and computer code available to anyone they can see what we did and how we did it. I have learned a lot by looking at other people's code. To this end a number of scientific journals (http://datadryad.org/pages/integratedJournals) now mandate depositing data into an archive. One very popular data archiving site is called the Dryad Digital Repository (www.datadryad.org). Dryad takes your data and code and gives it a permanent identifier so that people can cite it. And what's more, the data are secure and maintained by professionals. (See http://datadryad.org/pages/repository for a more detailed explanation of what they do). I have published three papers that have data on Dryad and it is now my standard operating practice to archive my data and computer code. And a lot of others are doing it as well. As of 23 September 2013 over 14,00 authors publishing in 259 different journals have deposited data with Dryad and people have downloaded data over 4 million times! This is great! This is fantastic! I think this is going to change for the worse  ..."