New Initiative Incentivizes Open Research

Christie Bahlai believes using open data hurt her chances at her first post-PhD job interview, for a tenure-track faculty position at a large university in the southern US. Bahlai says she got an unexpected reaction from the search committee chair when she explained that her research mostly used other people’s data to analyze insect population dynamics. She recalls him asking her, “What happens when the data runs out?” To her, it seemed like the chair didn’t understand how much open data was available online for people to mine and use in their own research. When she tried to explain it, he seemed skeptical. “He couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that data was being shared,” she says.

To Bahlai, open science represents the democratization of science, with researchers making their data, code, and other resources used in a study available for anyone to see. “The idea is that the ...