Cancer Researchers, Some Federally Funded, Do Not Share Study Data With Others
By querying the full text of the scientific literature through websites like Google Scholar and PubMed Central, Piwowar identified eleven thousand studies that collected a particular type of data about cellular activity, called gene expression microarray data. Only 45% of recent gene expression studies were found to have deposited their data in the public databases developed for this purpose. The rate of data publication has increased only slightly from 2007 to 2009. Data is shared least often from studies on cancer and human subjects: cancer studies make their data available for wide reuse half as often as similar studies outside cancer.
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Academic research is a competitive field. Many researchers are afraid someone else will take their findings and advance in the field — capturing funding they believe is rightfully theirs.
When you stop to think about it, this is really outrageous.
Absurd. Indefensible.
I’m a little confused. I thought that the editors of medical journals had agreed not to pubish articles based on research that had not previously been registered publicly. The goal was to reduce selection bias in the publication of results.
But perhaps I have misunderstood the difference between registering a research project and actually archiving the data in an open database.
This is not an easy nut to crack open. Perhaps the best way to think of this information is not as a public good but as a club good, for which the oncologists and affiliated researchers are members of the club.
The “club” pays for the data and they all have access to it. After all, they have the professional privilege of profiting from the data as a class. This would smooth out the winner-take-all element of the research enterprise, which might be net positive because there must be a lot of luck in the event of one researcher’s project failing and another’s succeeding.
But then again: Competition is a good thing.
This is not unlike the military, where a Navy pilot cannot communicate with an Air Force pilot flying over the same battlefield, because each uses a proprietary communication system.