[Taxacom] Impediments to biodiversity data sharing

Fri Dec 31 03:55:22 CST 2010

Dear Tony,

Thanks for the link to Froese et al., which is a rather more nuanced  
study than my suggestion that the issue is either fear or arrogance(!)  
I've added their report to the "Data citation" group on Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/groups/544621/data-citation/ 
  ), which contains a number of papers on this topic.

Despite what my blog posts and email may suggest, I do empathise with  
these concerns. When I was developing programs such as TreeView in the  
'90's, I was somewhat taken aback that people would expect me to just  
give them the source code. I'd sweated blood to get it looking just  
right on both Macs and Windows, spending more hours than I care to  
remember learning about the intricacies of each platform, so my gut  
reaction was "and you just want me to hand this over?"

Slowly I bought into open source, partly because I bought the  
philosophical arguments about making code available, partly because I  
learnt so much from other people's code that it felt only fair to make  
mine available, but also because I got useful feedback that I wouldn't  
have otherwise received. The most detailed and useful review I ever  
got for a manuscript was when a reviewer looked through my source code  
for a program and pointed out that my description in the manuscript  
didn't correspond to what the program was actually doing. Furthermore,  
some of my code has been reused in other people's projects, which in  
some ways is more gratifying than having someone simply cite a paper.

Clearly many people are unconvinced of the benefits of openly sharing  
data, both to themselves and the wider community. But I still argue  
failure to share (or sharing with burdensome restrictions) is  
crippling our field.

Regards

Rod

On 30 Dec 2010, at 22:57, <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> <Tony.Rees at csiro.au>  
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Rod Page wrote:
>
> <snip>
> But , leaving that aside, why expressly prevent people building on
> your work? To me It speaks either of fear ("people will take 'my' data
> and do things with it") or arrogance ("the data is perfect, nobody can
> improve upon it"). It also speaks of a greater concern for data
> providers ("we invested a lot of effort in gathering this data") than
> data users. I would argue this attitude is crippling biodiversity
> informatics.
> </snip>
>
> Actually the concerns / reluctance of data custodians are a little  
> more complex than this - which does not mean they cannot be  
> addressed, merely that they should at least be recognised as real  
> and strategies be put in place to mitigate perceived fears arising  
> from greater public access to  / re-use of the data. Back in 2004-5  
> (I think), Rainer Froese of FishBase has encountered many similar  
> issues with some potential data providers and conducted a workshop /  
> survey to look into this in some detail - see description and  
> discussion paper at http://filaman.uni-kiel.de/ifmgeomar/rfroese/ConcernsDataowners.pdf 
>  . It would be interesting to see five years on whether the concerns  
> of data custodians have been addressed to any significant degree and  
> resulted in associated freeing up of access to relevant data in the  
> mean time, or if not, what additional steps could or should be done  
> in this area.
>
> Regards - Tony
>
> ________________________________________
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
> ] On Behalf Of Roderic Page [r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk]
> Sent: Friday, 31 December 2010 12:33 AM
> To: TAXACOM
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Completion of 'The Plant List'
>
> Dear Paul,
>
> On 30 Dec 2010, at 12:45, Paul van Rijckevorsel wrote:
>
>> From: "Roderic Page" <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 8:26 PM
>>
>>> Nice data set, shame about the license. By using a Creative Commons
>>> CC
>>> BY-NC-ND license, Kew and MOBOT have effectively killed the
>>> possibility of anybody building upon this data (see my blog post
>>> http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/12/plant-list-nice-data-shame-it-not-open.html
>>
>> ***
>> I do not see why this should not be a perfectly respectable choice.
>> Of course, it always is nice if everything you want is offered free
>> to you,
>> whenever you want it, but it is shortsighted to expect this to  
>> happen,
>> or to ignore the risks.
>>
>
> People making data available are, of course, free to choose whatever
> license they see fit (although the typical Creative Commons licenses
> don't really fit, see http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/creative-commons-is-not-appropriate-for-data
>  ). I suspect that if someone dug deep into the sources of the data,
> funding, etc., it would be hard to defend a  Creative Commons license
> for this list.
>
> But , leaving that aside, why expressly prevent people building on
> your work? To me It speaks either of fear ("people will take 'my' data
> and do things with it") or arrogance ("the data is perfect, nobody can
> improve upon it"). It also speaks of a greater concern for data
> providers ("we invested a lot of effort in gathering this data") than
> data users. I would argue this attitude is crippling biodiversity
> informatics. Compare this with, say, GenBank or Wikipedia, which
> people are downloading and doing amazing things with, because they
> can. The Plant List has killed the possibility of people doing
> interesting things with the data.  I think it's a stunningly short
> sighted decision.

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html