Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [4]
This is a happy story, but it has an unhappy coda. The Bermuda Agreement originally only applied to human genetic data. There have since been many attempts to extend the spirit of the agreement, so that more genetic data is shared. But despite these attempts, there are still many forms of life for which genetic data remains secret. For example, as of 2010 there is no worldwide agreement to share data about the influenza virus. Steps toward such an agreement remain bogged down in wrangling among the leading parties. To give you the flavor of how many scientists think about sharing non-human genetic data, one scientist recently told me that he’d been “sitting on a genome” for an entire species (!) for more than a year. Without any incentive to share, and with many reasons not to, scientists hoard their data. As a result, there’s an emerging data divide between our understanding of life-forms such as human beings, where nearly all genetic data are available online, and life-forms such as influenza, where important data remain locked up.
This story makes it sound as though the scientists involved are greedy and destructive. After all, this research is typically paid for using public funds. Shouldn’t scientists make their results available as soon as possible? There’s truth to these ideas, but the situation is complex. To understand what’s going on, you need to understand the incredible competitive pressures on ambitious young scientists. On the rare occasion a good long-term job at a major university opens up, there are often hundreds of superbly-qualified applicants. Competition for jobs is so fierce that eighty-hour-plus workweeks are common among young scientists. As much of that time as possible is spent working on the one thing that will get such a job: amassing an impressive record of scientific papers. Those papers will bring in the research grants and letters of recommendation necessary to find long-term employment. The pace relaxes after tenure, but continued grant support still requires a strong work ethic. The result is that while many scientists agree in principle that they’d love to share their data in advance of publication, they worry that doing so will give their competitors an unfair advantage. Those competitors could exploit that knowledge to rush their results into print first, or, worse, even steal the data outright and present the results as their own. It’s only practical to share data if everyone is protected by a collective agreement such as the Bermuda agreement.
A similar pattern has seen scientists resist contributing to many other online projects. Consider Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia has a vision statement to warm a scientist’s heart: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” You might think Wikipedia was started by scientists eager to share all the world’s knowledge, but you’d be wrong. In fact, it was started by Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, who at the time was cofounder of an online company mostly