Jaz drives, spiral notebooks, and SCSI: how we lose scientific data

"None of this should be viewed as an excuse for keeping scientific data from being shared with the community. The digital era may have added some new wrinkles to the process, but overall, it has drastically lowered the barriers to open access to data. However, the barriers aren't gone. Some data, for legal reasons, can never be shared. In other cases, the time spent to prepare it for public access greatly outweighs the value of providing access. Simple rules, such as "all data should be available," simply don't recognize these complex realities...."