[seek-dev] Re: [kepler-dev] Query Builder Code Review

[Ferdinando Villa]

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 19:17, Bertram Ludaescher wrote:
> Yes, they are different, but there is value to both and the difference
> is not as large as you may think. In some (life science) domains,
> publishing a paper is almost tantamount to uploading a dataset (having
> the experimental data, information about the protocol etc). The paper
> really just means to cut down a bunch of trees to produce paper that
> holds the long list of authors (all the students, postdocs, and last
> not least the lab director/PI ;-), plus of course the reputation of
> the journal -- which ultimately comes from the community itself.

I'm assuming you're not referring to ecology here (the focal domain of
what we're doing) where this description would not earn you a lot of
friends, being in most cases highly inappropriate and not reflective of
the sophistication of analysis and high generalization that ecology has
historically been striving for.

This said, maybe SEEK-related efforts should be more active in shaping
the incentive structure for data sharing and promoting peer review of
data so that they can count as publications. We're trying to do what we
can with our database efforts, where an editorial board releases
certifications of data quality, and there's an effort called "open
research" led by a bunch of colleagues that tries to address the issue
with reference to the principles of open source software development.
Maybe that's something we should address, too.

-- 
Ferdinando Villa, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor, Ecoinformatics
Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and Dept of Botany, Univ. of Vermont
http://ecoinformatics.uvm.edu