Data Sharing

The Nature Publishing Group has put out an interesting series of articles in their September 10 issue on data sharing: why, why not, and why the sciences are strongly disinclined to open up their harddrives.

Crowd-sourcing dinosaur science! The Open Dinosaur Project

Here's an innovative way to get science done, and get people involved at the same time. Three researchers asking for help from the public to enter data into a giant spreadsheet. There must be hundreds of projects that could progress this way.

From their organizing blog:


Introducing the Open Dinosaur Project
Posted September 8, 2009

Hello, and thanks for dropping by at the Open Dinosaur Project. This blog is part of a wider project, in which we hope — with your help — to make some science. We want to put together a paper on the multiple independent transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in ornithischians, and we want to involve everyone who’s interested in helping out. We’ll get to the details later, but the basic idea is to amass a huge database of measurements of the limb bones of ornithischian dinosaurs, to which we can apply various statistical techniques. Hopefully we’ll figure out how these transitions happened — for example, whether ceratopsians, thyreophorans and ornithopods all made it in the same way or differently.
...
if you care about dinosaurs, and want to make some science, then you can be involved. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a seasoned professional palaeontologist, a high-school kid or a retired used-car salesman: so long as you can conduct yourself like a professional, you’re welcome here.

And now, for the gory details. . .

and so on - check it out here: http://opendino.wordpress.com/
Thanks to CoTurnix's A Blog Around the Clock for this.