[From the blog “How Freely Should Scientists Share Their Data?” by Daniel Barron, published at blogs.scientificamerican.com]

“At the beginning of graduate school, I decided I wanted to study how epileptic seizures damage the brain. I was in something of a pickle: I wanted to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study this damage, but I didn’t have access to MRI data of patients with epilepsy. Even if I had that data, I didn’t know much about programming or mathematics or physics, so I couldn’t have created ex nihilo the software tools to analyze the data anyway. So, I was driven and energetic and wanted to study epilepsy, but I didn’t have the data or tools to work with.”

“… At around this time, I first heard about the Open Science movement—the increasingly popular belief that scientific methods and data should be freely available. The overall goal is to make science as democratic and accessible as possible. To do this, Open Scientists make their data, methods and code (computer programs that analyze data) openly available to the public. Open Scientists also share with their colleagues, which, as I discovered as a graduate student, can be a great boon to science.”

“I also heard cautionary tales that the Open Science movement had a dark side, that “openness” had, at times, devolved into bullying and theft. Some compared the Open Science movement to Communism: good in principle, impossible in practice. In informal settings—at dinner, over drinks—I was reminded that science was a competitive business.”