Scientists’ Attitudes toward Data Sharing

Numerous proposals have been put forward in recent years to encourage or require scientists to share their data with interested parties, especially data collected with public funding (e.g., Cecil and Griffin 1983). Whenever someone proposes a new scheme to encourage the sharing of data that were gathered with the support of federal dollars, one envisions physicists being permitted to visit their colleagues' NSF-funded supercomputers or the swapping of cell lines among biotechnologists. Implicit in such attempts to foster data sharing among these scientists is the desire to forestall the private profit motive, thought by some to lurk just beneath the surface of all research that has a potential "cash value." This article explores these issues and summarizes survey research on attitudes toward them.