Scientists lead the push for open data sharing

Abstract

Scientists are notorious for keeping their work under lock and key, preventing an enormous body of scientific knowledge from being accessed by those who need it most. However, scientists at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron Source of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK are changing the way scientists communicate by making their data publicly available on the web. By making its work public, ISIS is helping the researchers who use the facility. In the ISIS Biomolecular Sciences group, the goal is to make research records and the data available on the web as soon as possible. The open notebook approach is not currently a standard ISIS policy for data access, but the scientists are exploring the approaches that could work at a large research centre like ISIS, with the aim of simply making more of this information available to those who want and need it. Adapted from the source document.