NYT: One Find, Two Astronomers Pointed out by the Quantum Pontif (free reg req. when it stops being avail there, use this citation to find it in a library database: Dennis Overbye, "One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl" NY Times 9/13/2005)

This is interesting, actually, because I was just reading in (Birnholtz 2005) about how there are real concerns with sharing data and that in some fields (obviously not astro!) it’s common to delay data until the institution/research group gathering the data has published. Apparently there’s also a deal whereby an outside researcher can see the data if they make the owning researchers co-authors. Sometimes, the funder “forces” data sharing. Hmm.

In an earlier work by Birnholtz, he listed four categories of sharing data: 1) no need to share – you have the data, know how, etc. 2) have data, need collaborator with know-how 3) have data not relevant to your interests, fine to give to someone who can use it 4) “d’oh” – data of interest but you embarrassingly miss running the important analysis (Birnholtz and Bietz 2003, 7). I think in the NYT case, they had the data, had run the analysis, but didn’t publish. Oops.

References
Birnholtz, Jeremy P. 2005. When do researchers collaborate? Toward a model of collaboration propensity in science and engineering research. Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan.
Birnholtz, Jeremy P., Matthew J. Bietz. 2003. Data at work: Supporting sharing in science and engineering. In GROUP '03: Proceedings of the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on supporting group work339-348ACM Press.  ¶ 5:22 PM| |cites (technorati) |