We are constantly hearing suggestions to make all data gathered in biology experiments available online. This is an appealing idea because most data that we collect from experiments never sees the light of day. A smattering of our data appears in papers, of course, but we all recognize that this is usually a highly selected subset of all that is collected, intended to support the story that is being touted at the moment. If we could somehow make all of our data available to the community, the idea goes, biological progress would be greatly accelerated.
Despite the appeal of making all biological data accessible, there are enormous hurdles that currently make it impractical. For one, sharing all data requires that we agree on a set of standards. This is perhaps reasonable for large-scale automated technologies, such as microarrays, but the logistics of converting every western blot, ELISA, and protein assay ...
