I'm at a loss for words.This is a recurring topic in science and I still don't understand how this can be so common.
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This is a problem that people have been warning about for almost 15 years now, see e.g.:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/limited-access-is-a-symptom-not-the-disease/14465622
Slide 13-17 from 2012.
How can it be that so often in science, most people understand and agree that there is a massive problem and yet, nothing happens.
When the Flybase shit hit the fan, I contacted them and asked them for their plans for decentralization - they had none, they said.
I'm at a loss for words.This is a recurring topic in science and I still don't understand how this can be so common.
@brembs @albertcardona look at the incentive structures in science now. It’s all innovation, newness is fetishised, publish publish publish, only “high impact” journal publications really matter … where is the place for kind of boring, routine maintenance and enabling of others?
Point also being that no scientist has any training on how to organise datasets into useful databases, and the coordination overheads (not to speak of the credit-sharing issues) aren't ignorable when setting up a decentralized system.
Absolutely! This is not trivial, but imo needs to be done for all the ca. 1400 databases we have in all of biology.
Trivial or not, my guess would be that 15 years should be enough time?
