data sharing/commercial value

[Hugh Wilson]

While the scientific product is - in essence - a part of the public
domain, those seeking technical info must dig for it.  The cost of
extraction lowers the value of the product.  If science moves to
lower extraction costs, via web access, then - as Doug suggests -
data value should increase and those working to enhance data access
and add content should get a cut.  I agree.  But, I don't think
science can tap the marketplace *until* the scientific product is
available as a digital resource in a form that can be used by the
general public.  Thus, from a developmental perspective, data access
systems should be designed with a focus on speed, simplicity, and
easy access by non-technical users.  Slow, complex systems designed
for scientists by scientists will - in my view - not play in this
game.

Fred describes fundamental differences between science and the
marketplace that - I think - are real and important.  However, the
rise of biotech, and the concordant decline of organismal biology, is
linked to resource exchange between science and commerce.  Open
access to sequence data, based on content and access systems
developed (mostly) by science, is a significant component of this
enterprise.

If open access to biodiversity data carries the potential for
collections managers to tap into a new source of public funding
(registration, advertising, user fees, etc.) then it seeems to me
that this should be explored and developed.  The 1st step in this
process would probably be to develop fully open systems that carry
large amounts of high quality information.  This would test the
'value' theory and, if public value is present, establish a user
base.  The presence of an active user base would then form the
foundation for implementation of some sort of 'resource return'
tactic that would harvest from users or, more likely, corporate
entities that seek web exposure to users.

If systems could be developed to this point, profit allocation would
be a serious ethical and political problem.  That is why I feel that
professional societies represent 'pre-adapted' organizational nodes.
They are best positioned to insure that 'return' value from 'shared'
data is rolled back into the *discipline* responsible for data
content, and also mediate equitable resource allocation to individual
collections that have contributed to the system.  Given what appears
to be a general fear of exploitation, it could be argued that open
sharing of specimen data will not take place *until* professional
societies take a lead position in this arena.  They are the only
entity that provides an element of control for those - collections
managers - contributing data content.

On  8 Dec 98 at 21:05, Karstad-Schueler <bckcdb at ISTAR.CA> wrote:

le recipients of list TAXACOM

> Doug Yanega wrote:
>
> > another aspect of public access [to collection data]
> > is the access to *commercially valuable* scientific information. For
> > example, a person considering a new cash crop plant might simply
> > plug into collection databases and extract information about
> > insect pollinators or herbivores, etc., and profit
> > tremendously, with nothing going back to the institutions that
> > supplied the information.
> > if this information is worth so much money, then we may have a right
> > to share in that profit, a right we essentially
> > sacrifice if we make everything public.
>
> * I suggest that the problem here is a basic incompatibility of
> values. In science and scholarship the source of the data receives
> more status the more often and more widely the data are used, and we
> all try (within the constraints imposed by trying to get our own stuff
> out) to have our data and publications used and cited as widely as
> possible. Socially, scholarship is essentially a potlatch: we get
> status by giving stuff away, because the recipients can use what we
> give away, and we don't lose the use of it.
>
> Commerce is the opposite system: trying to get more stuff by taking it
> away from those who have it (this pleisiomorphic system is better
> suited to material 'resources' that aren't easily repoduced, as any
> Song Sparrow could explain). When commerce intrudes on scholarship,
> inviable hybrid, oxymoronic, phrases like "intellectual property
> rights" are spawned.
>
> If the "person considering raising a new cash crop plant" were working
> within a potlatch system, and was succcessful with the new crop, he
> would have (purely internally, without any external accounting) to try
> to give back to the source of the pollinator/herbivore data gifts
> whose value exceeded the benefit gained from the data, and they would,
> in turn, try to give him counsel whose value again exceeded that of
> the libraries, endowments, cabinets, etc, given in return for the
> first data.  The problem here, is that within our own system we have
> to give out data freely, and we don't have any automatic mechanism for
> excluding what evolutionary behaviourists or game theorists call
> 'cheaters.'.........................
>

Hugh D. Wilson
Texas A&M University - Biology
h-wilson at tamu.edu (409-845-3354)
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/Wilson/homepage.html