A movement called Open Science has been stirring debate in the scientific community about whether raw scientific data should be made available to everyone who wants to use it.
Better data makes for better science. But the issue isn’t so simple. Data has monetary and other intangible value.
Against all odds, a Twitter spat from early July highlighted both sides of the argument.
Daniel Barron recaps in the Scientific American:
It was particularly jarring to me when [Jack] Gallant’s colleagues publicly humiliated him on Twitter.
On July 4, Gallant (@gallantlab) was promoting Open Science, tweeting forth about free access software platforms. Gallant argued that giving away free code is pointless if it only works within an expensive software program, which, he continued, is “NOT open code, it is a walled garden.”
“Nice advice. But what about data?” Manilo De Domenico (@manlius84), a theoretical physicist, tweeted the next day, “We keep trying to ask access to data used in your nature 2016, but we received not a single reply, yet. #opencode #opendata”
