ISTOCK, RAWPIXELShould you share your scientific data? If you pose this question to almost any scientist, the answer will usually be an emphatic “yes,” because everyone appears to benefit.
The most obvious beneficiaries of open-source data are investigators who cannot gather their own data—they may not have the opportunity, for example, to perform particle physics experiments, gather arctic ice core samples, or capture clinical brain images. Those who share their data benefit from the crowdsourced scrutiny, analyses, and interpretations of the data by many investigators across many disciplines; more eyes on the data can lead to better and broader insights. Funders of scientific research benefit because it is less expensive to share and combine data than it is to needlessly duplicate efforts to acquire it. And science itself benefits when combining shared datasets increases statistical power, and therefore reproducibility, and trustworthiness of scientific results. This point is particularly poignant these days, given concerns that ...
