Thanks for your reply. You obviously know a lot about opensharing of data. I can understand that data/research results/publications once produced and put on a server can be reproduced and spread at almost 0 cost (Genomic data because of its storage and transport cost maynot be as cheap as research results/publications (https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2017/05/09/phasing-out-support-for-non-human-genome-organism-data-in-dbsnp-and-dbvar/).
I can see how its beneficial for the consumers of the *omic data sets/research results/publication to have access to these. However, I am wondering how this incentivizes the producers of these data/research results? The benefit as I can see it comes from perhaps recognition etc, but that’s not going to feed them for long. I have seen how expensive generating high quality research results/curating/producing data can be in terms of consumables and skilled labor, first hand.
To give an analogy, in an analytical chemistry lab, people use all kinds of reagents. It would be easy to claim that if these reagents would be available for free, then everybody could produce more research results, do more experiments. But who’s going to produce these reagents for free?
I can definitely see the role of government coming in and subsidizing the cost of producing these datasets to spur the initial snowball effect, as you pointed out. Without this initial investment from the government, this field would have a hard time getting started or not start at all. But over the long term, government subsidy cannot subsidize the cost of producing/sharing genomic data, it has to come from private individual’s/entities.
Again to use an analogy we can look at how startups/VCs interact. VCs come in in the initial phase of a startups life, where it has an idea but needs to be bankrolled to make it into a viable product. But VCs don’t support them indefinitely. At some point the products that the startups are producing need to stand by itself and the cost of producing the products need to be paid for by selling the products to private entities.
To use another analogy, I was definitely a proponent of the open-software movement, as it seemed to be me that it was amazing that I could get all these software’s for free. However, over the long term, I see that closed-source software has definitely gathered more usage, atleast in terms of the usage of software among non-coders/majority of the people in the world.
So I am curious to know why you think open data is better than closed/paid data sources?
Perhaps there is a source with more detailed discussion on this topic?
