How to Share Scientific Data - NYTimes.com
peter.suber's bookmarks 2013-08-13
Summary:
"Dr. Berman and Dr. Cerf argued in their paper that private companies, as well as academic and corporate laboratories, must be willing to invest in new computer data centers and storage systems so that crucial research data is not irretrievably lost.
“There is no economic ‘magic bullet’ that does not require someone, somewhere, to pay,” they wrote.
Dr. Berman is the chairwoman of the United States branch of the Research Data Alliance, an organization of academic, government and corporate researchers attempting to build new systems to store the digital data sets being created, and to develop new software techniques for integrating different kinds of data and making it accessible. “Publicly accessible data requires a stable home and someone to pay the mortgage,” she said in an interview.
Google initially promised to host large data sets for scientists for free, and then killed the program in 2008 after just a year, for unspecified business reasons.
It may have been that the company was taken aback by the size of scientific research data sets. For example, the Obama administration’s proposal to eventually capture the activity of just one million neurons in the human brain (the human brain has about 85 to 100 billion neurons) for a year would require about 3 petabytes of data storage, or almost one third the amount generated by the Large Hadron Collider during the same period.
Dr. Berman said she was heartened to see a growing international recognition of the scope of the problem. The Research Data Alliance, begun last August with an international telephone conference of just eight researchers, now has more than 750 academic, corporate and government scientists and information technology specialists in 50 countries.
In their paper, she and Dr. Cerf argue that coping with the explosion of data would require a cultural shift on the part of not just the government and corporate institutions, but also individual scientists.
“The casual approach for many scientists has been to ‘stick it on my disk drive and make it available to anyone who wants to use it,’ ” Dr. Cerf said...."