Major Scientific Journal Publisher Requires Public Access To Data

An anonymous reader writes "PLOS — the Public Library of Science — is one of the most prolific publishers of research papers in the world. 'Open access' is one of their mantras, and they've been working to push the academic publishing system into a state where research isn't locked behind paywalls and subscription services. To that end, they've announced a new policy for all of their journals: 'authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article.' The data must be available within the article itself, in the supplementary information, or within a stable, public repository. This is good news for replicating experiments, building on past results, and science in general."

U.S. funding agencies too

[PvtVoid]

Actually, the Obama administration has mandated open data [whitehouse.gov] for all federally supported research. Good news indeed.

Re:good and bad

[canowhoopass.com]

The linked blog specifically mentions patient privacy as an allowable exception. They also have exceptions for private third party data, and endangered species data. I suspect they want to keep the GPS locations for white rhino's hidden.

Re:Practicalities

[RDW]

There could be significant issues with biomedical data, too. For example, the policy gives the example of 'next-generation sequence reads' (raw genomic sequence data), but it's hard to make this truly anonymous (as legally and ethically it may have to be). For example, some researchers have identified named individuals from public sequence data with associated metadata: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]

Re: Practicalities

[Obfuscant]

Whether or not you make the data publically available, you have to store and make it privately available,

I have boxes and boxes of mag tapes with data on it from past experiments. That's privately available. It will never be publicly available.

putting in public access is a matter of creating a read-only user and opening a firewall port.

It is clear that you have never done such a thing yourself. There is a bit more to it than what you claim. I've been doing it for more than twenty years, keeping a public availability to much of the data we have (but not all -- tapes are not easily made public that way), and there is a lot more to dealing with a public presence than just "a read-only user and a firewall port".

The sad thing is that most scientists don't actually store their data properly, it sits on removable hard drives, cd or an older variant of portable media

And now you point out the biggest issue with public access to data: the cost of making it online 24/7 so the "public" can maybe sometime come look at the data. Removable hard drives are perfectly good for storing old data, and they cost a lot less than an online raid system. For that data, that is storing it "properly".

If you want properly managed, publicly open data for every experiment, be prepared to pay more for the research. And THEN be prepared to pay more for the archivist who has to keep those systems online for you after the grants run out. And by "you", I'm referring to you as the public.

Researchers get X amount of dollars to do an experiment. Once that grant runs out there is no more money for maintenance of the online archive, if there was money for that in the first place. For twenty two years our online access has been done using stolen time and equipment not yet retired. When the next grant runs out, the very good question will be who is going to be maintaining the existing systems that were paid for under those grants. Do they just stop?