Knowledge sharing in science

byDSamuel

83 followers

Updated 9 years ago

Knowledge sharing in science includes sharing research data. Research funding agencies have focused on increasing the supply of data by requiring data management plans and data sharing. Policy makers have paid surprisingly little attention to the demand for data. It stands to reason that if scholars actively sought data for reuse, then more data would be shared. The few studies that exist on the demand for extant data suggest that researchers rarely are asked for their data and rarely seek data from other investigators. Many investigators have difficulty imagining who might want their data or for what purposes they might be useful. The talk will explore the supply and demand for scientific data reuse, drawing on studies in astronomy and sensor networks, and will discuss implications for science policy.

But we should be concerned. Because the world, science and its place in our society has changed. From mobile technologies that are extending our friendship circles or surveillance technologies that challenge our sense of privacy, to personalised medicines that are changing the way we treat illness (and fund the NHS), or emerging areas like synthetic biology that have the potential to make us rethink what life itself is, science and technology is changing how we think, act and feel in profound ways. We can no longer separate the social or ethical effects of science and technology from the science itself. As we saw with the debate around GM, the ‘people’ side of science has become as important as the ‘rational’ side.

This is, of course, nonsense. As many girls as boys study science at GCSE and while fewer study maths and physics at A level, girls do better than boys. And though the history of science is built around stories of great male discoveries, whether it is the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA or Richard Doll’s research into the link between smoking and cancer, in so many cases the crucial work was carried out by (overlooked) female scientists.