John Markoff has a piece in yesterday’s NY Times about the limited availability of huge troves of digital and internet data produced by companies like Google and Facebook.
The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries.
The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience.
If the data are not made available to the degree that outside authorities can verify the result, you are not producing scientific knowledge. You might be participating in the scientific process in some form or another by postulating new hypotheses or other such activities, but you aren’t doing anything that lets people say, “we know this because…”
John Hawks, also commenting on the piece, notes that several recent papers in the journal Science fail to meet the journal’s stated policy when it comes to data access.
