Open Research Data

Samir: I think every publicly funded study should be required to release its raw data the day the paper comes out. Half the results in my field can't be reproduced, and secrecy about data is a big part of why.

Ingrid: I work with patient interviews, and I can't just post those online. Even with names removed, a combination of age, town and diagnosis can identify someone in a small community.

Lucia: I'm somewhere between you two. Openness is clearly right in principle, but in my lab a dataset takes three years to collect, and if we release it immediately, a bigger group with more staff will publish the follow-up studies before we can.

Samir: That sounds like protecting careers rather than science. The data was paid for by the public.

Ingrid: To be fair, Lucia's concern affects small labs and early-career researchers most, and those are exactly the people we claim to want to support. A one-year embargo would address it without closing the data forever.

Lucia: I could accept an embargo like that, and honestly I'd rather have a fixed rule than the current situation where everyone just says the data is available on request and then ignores the emails.

Samir: Alright, an embargo for original collectors and proper anonymisation for sensitive data. I'd still want the default to be open, with exceptions justified in writing.