Sharing Scientific Data: Moving Toward “Open Data”

Abstract

As the advantages of data sharing are increasingly recognized, the issues surrounding sharing and accessibility of scientific data are being widely discussed. Meanwhile, an “open data” revolution is taking shape in parallel to the open access movement for scientific publishing. The developments and contributions of a variety of stakeholders in shaping the dialog concerning scientific data sharing are discussed in this chapter. Data sharing issues and challenges are unique to each scientific discipline; highlighting these dissimilarities associated with two distinctly different disciplines, ecology and genomics are examined. In addition, challenges associated with openly sharing genomic data are discussed in detail.