Can scientists learn to share data in a repository?

Nature News : In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university’s investigators could produce.At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university’s River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites."So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, ‘OK, here it is. We’re ready. Give us your stuff’,” she says. “And that’s where we hit the wall.” When the time came, scientists couldn’t find their data, or didn’t understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn’t have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers’ concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?