On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> SH: One publication? What if they've gathered a lot of time-consuming
>> data, amenable to a lot of time-consuming analysis?
>
> BG: What if they've gathered enough data for a lifetime of analysis? Should
> they have the right to hoard their data for the rest of their life? Where
> do you draw the line? Does it make any difference, ethically, whether they
> collected that data using public funds?
Unfortunately, you are missing the point I keep trying to make: The
length of time researchers may need to embargo access to the data they
have gathered is something that depends on the field and data, and
hence OD needs to be negotiated with the funder, possibly on a case by
case basis.
This is notably not the case with OA to published research, in which,
without exception, research, researchers, their funders and their
institutions all benefit most from OA being provided immediately upon
acceptance for publication (and the only conflict of interest is with
a 3rd-party service-provider: the publisher).
You proposed, simply, that research data should be made OD immediately
upon publication. I am pointing out the genuine complications you are
not taking into account. I am not at all suggesting that OD, as soon
as possible, is not a good and desirable thing. It is simply far from
being as straightforward as OA, especially insofar as mandating (i.e.,
requiring) is concerned, because there is no conflict with the
researcher's interest in the case of OA, whereas there may well be
considerable conflict with the researcher's interest in the case of
OD. And it is all about timing.
As a consequence, it is very important to keep OA and OD separate,
especially as regards mandates. Because of the conflict of interest,
this is not a matter to be settled by a-priori ideology, but by
realism, fairness and pragmatics.
Stevan Harnad
PS By way of an indication that I am fully cognizant of (and opposed
to) authors sitting unnecessarily long on their database, there was in
my own field a case in which a team of researchers had been funded to
collect data worldwide for a global color perception database.
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/ There was considerable controversy
and consternation in the field after the data-gathering because of
delays in publication and release. Many researchers in the field felt
that the delays in both had slowed rather than advanced research
progress. Here was a case where an advance negotiation between the
funders and the researchers on the permissible length of the access
embargo would have been helpful, would probably have speeded the
research, and would probably have resulted in greater research
progress. But the punchline from such cases is certainly is not that
for all data, the embargo should therefore be of length zero, either
between data of collection and date of publication, or between data of
publication and date of data-release as OD. The punchline is that OD
parameters need to be negotiated in advance, on a case by case basis,
with an emphasis on publication as well as release as soon as fair and
practicable. There is nothing like this with OA.
Received on Fri May 21 2010 - 12:42:00 BST