In BMC Research Notes, Vincent S. Smith of the Natural History Museum in London published Data Publication: Towards a Database of Everything. As Smith wrote:
… outside a handful of disciplines, publication of science data is the exception, not the rule.
As one driver for increasing the publication of data, Smith suggested:
If data publication is to become a part of normal scientific practice it has to be easy to achieve.
That might be so. If it is, how could it be made easier? On the other hand, easier data publishing could lead to a decline in the value of the data that do get published. So if it becomes incredibly easy to publish data, what will maintain data quality?
For some fields, especially genomics and personalized medicine, data would also be more useful if it were easier to share. Recently, I wrote about this topic in Sharing the Wealth of Data in Scientific American Worldview. In medicine, especially on the pharmaceutical side, much of the data could always remain proprietary. Moreover, some patients will want their data private as well, or at least protected.
So although issues of data publication and sharing both depend on technology, a range of other issues—economic, political, sociological, and so on—must be considered, as well.
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