data sharing/security

[Doug Yanega]

While it's great to see how this has taken off, no one has addressed one of
the questions I raised when I started it - another aspect of public access
is the access to *commercially valuable* scientific information. For
example, a person considering raising a new cash crop plant might simply
plug into some collection databases and extract information about known
insect visitors, be they pollinators or herbivores, etc., and profit
tremendously from this, with nothing going back to the institutions that
supplied the information. I just use this as an example to demonstrate an
argument that was presented to me by a colleague as a reason why NOT to
make our collection records and all their data available to everyone. That
is, 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 didn't have a good response handy, and I still don't,
really. Is anyone else at all concerned about this side of things?

Peace,

Doug Yanega    Depto. de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Ciencias Biologicas,
Univ. Fed. de Minas Gerais, Cx.P. 486, 30.161-970 Belo Horizonte, MG   BRAZIL
phone: 31-499-2579, fax: 31-499-2567  (from U.S., prefix 011-55)
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82