Today, we are pleased to announce our first Advisory Panel and Editorial Board members from the social sciences. Researchers from these communities are now invited to submit Data Descriptor manuscripts describing quantitative datasets, particularly those that may be of use for integrative analyses that stretch across the traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Continue reading
Tony Hey is the Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections
My job at Microsoft Research is to connect external scientific researchers with some of our researchers at Microsoft so they can solve big data scientific problems that people care about by applying advanced computing technologies. The programme covers the world, every continent except Antarctica, and it really is all about data and the fact that the scale of data has changed the way we do science. We’re in a new stage of doing science, which is data intensive. It’s often distributed; you have to get data sets from different places and put it together. Continue reading
Isaac Kohane is a Professor of Pediatrics and Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School, USA.
I work in the multidisciplinary field of bioinformatics, making use of large clinical and genomic datasets to identify signifiers for a variety of conditions with genetic links: autism, major depression, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes. Genetics has been amongst the leaders for the sharing of data, although historically clinical data has not been aggregated and shared to the same extent. Continue reading
Gavin Simpson is a Quantitative Environmental Scientist at the Institute of Environmental Change and Society, University of Regina, Canada.
As far as ecology goes in general I don’t think we’ve been very good at sharing data; we haven’t been very open in the way that we share data. There are a lot of people who collaborate on datasets and do things in private, but little in the open. There are a few big exceptions, things like the Breeding Birds Survey and a few other larger datasets, but they’re the exceptions rather than the rule. It’s changing, there’s been a movement towards making more and more data freely and openly available, but I think it’s still very much lagging behind open access in preparing journal articles. Continue reading
Stephen Friend is the President, Co-Founder, and Director of Sage Bionetworks, USA.
Totally unopen. Compare the culture of biomedical research with the cultures around synthetic biology, around model organisms, and around the generation of genomic data. These are three examples where particular leaders in each of those fields have driven a large amount of sharing and open collaboration that is orders of magnitude more open than biomedical research. In biomedical research there are individuals who work for five to ten years to develop a cohort, which they then believe is their cohort, it’s not anyone else’s, it’s theirs, and they have the right till the last post doc leaves their lab, to not let others look at the data until they get authorship on a paper. Continue reading
Mike Huerta is the Associate Director of the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, USA.
At the moment in biomedical research it’s a hodgepodge. There are some broad policies across all of NIH for example, and there are policies that pertain to research funded by particular foundations, but there is no single policy. There are areas of biomedical research, such as genomics, that have a rich history and an active data sharing policy, and there are some particular initiatives, or projects that NIH is funding, that have requirements for data sharing, for example, the Human Connectome Project and the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. But there is increasing interest across much of federal government in how to increase access to the results of research. For example, a memo came from the Office of Science and Technology Policy in February 2013 asking agencies that fund significant amounts of research for plans to increase access to both data and publications. In the not too distant future, in response to such policy initiatives, increasing technical capabilities to share, recognition of the importance of data sharing from the scientific perspective, and changes in the expectations and perspectives of society, we’re going to see a big increase in data sharing in biomedical research and other kinds of scientific research as well. Continue reading
Maryann Martone is Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, USA.
The routine sharing of imaging data in neuroscience is very nascent. We ran a database called the Cell Centered Database, which is still up and has merged with the American Society of Cell Biology’s Cell Image Library, and whereas we get a few unsolicited contributions from the neuroscience community most of the time if we want data we have to explicitly ask for it, or it just simply doesn’t exist. There are some neuroscientists that share their images by just putting them on web pages and those who are starting to share through www.openconnectomeproject.org but I would say that in the imaging field it’s still very ad hoc. Continue reading
Albert Heck is a Professor of Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics, at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and head of the Netherlands Proteomics Centre.
In the field of proteomics we generate large data sets, it’s almost impossible to completely interpret these data sets yourself, and so, there’s a huge effort to share these data sets. It’s actually the journals that have been important in that, together they have enforced that people start to use these public repositories. There are different levels of repository. There are repositories where we put our raw data which is mandatory, and repositories that contain a small proportion of the end result. Continue reading
Ioannis Xenarios is Director of Swiss-Prot and Vital-IT at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and Professor in computational biology and bioinformatics at the Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne.
My field is bioinformatics, biocuration, and models. People recognize they have to be good citizens, and providing all the data and the tools is the best way forward, but we are not looking at the Higgs Boson or some stars in the sky that will have little direct effect on our present livelihood or economical wealth (not to say that it is not extremely interesting science). There is a tendency to think that all government funded activities have to be open access and reusable, but at the same time you also have a lot of the universities that have created technology transfer organisations as a means to valorize their data and intellectual properties. There is a closed system on top of an open access system. Continue reading
Brenton Graveley is the John and Donna Krenicki Professor in Genomics and Personalized Healthcare, Associate Director of the UConn Institute for Systems Genomics, Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at UConn Health, Farmington, CT, USA.
My main field is genomics, and it’s probably one of the fields that shares data the best. Genomics has a fairly open culture; not everyone in the entire field is open, but in general it’s open. There’s a very large amount of shared data, both from groups that wait until the day the paper’s published to share it and groups that release data prior to publications. I’m involved in the ENCODE project and we are depositing all of the data generated, as soon as we generate the data and it meets a certain quality. Continue reading