Is there currently much motivation for a given researcher to keep the data online somewhere after the paper is out? Who would handle the hosting?
Have you had any luck emailing the author of the paper?
Have you had any luck emailing the author of the paper?
This works sometimes. People want to be cited after all. Sometimes you just never get a response. Also not viable for lab courses in graduate school, where you need to "compare your results with the literature", or for "calibrate my instruments" type situations (rather than "cite you" type situations) - there's some data that would be useful for things that aren't really worth bothering a PI over.
If I were a funding agency, I would earmark funding specifically for hosting data, because that's the biggest value of a lot of experimental science. A lot of times the data analysis is pedestrian, but actually taking measurements is difficult and expensive.
Everything from incentives to the attitude seems to make academic research groups act like sealed little islands of "brilliance".
Researchers should be strongly "incentivized" to make their data and source code available and immediately usable (ie, not in Matlab). And the only way to do that is to gradually devalue data-less, source-code-less research in the way non-peer-review research is now devalued. (and yes, it will be messy, embarrassing, fragile code sometimes but we'll have to live with that).
The amazing thing is that small, for-profit, private research organizations can still operate with this "what we produce is a pdf with a picture of our research on it" attitude.
Btw, one organization can and I think is help is PLOS: http://www.plos.org/
I disagree with this one. Matlab is nice, and I'm going to use it if it's available (and if I'm doing linear algebra - if the problem is more graph/tree-ish, I might reach for SciPy).
If I plan on maintaining something, I want static typing, so the whole SciPy/Matlab/Octave/R debate is a little moot for me there.
In Python or Matlab, I have to read the implementation to see what types it wants. To me, having collections of type signatures in a separate file is a huge boon when I have to come back to code I haven't seen for a while - it's a 10,000 foot view of what the code does that helps jog my memory - and it's guaranteed to be accurate, unlike documentation.
To the extent that static typing supposedly prevents bugs, I agree that it is overrated. My neutron transport solver I wrote in Haskell had plenty of god damn bugs after I got it to compile, thank you very much (perhaps a very deep Haskell-fu is required to attain the mythical "neutron transport solver that works right the first time" - in any case I realized that compiler-aided bug prevention is not a low-hanging fruit in Haskell, so I lost interest).
That was a long-winded way to say that I feel lost and alone without function signatures, and that this preference is possibly only quasi-rational.
The university and/or the journal. Supposedly, part of their existence and social contract is to maintain knowledge archives for public benefit (even if its not free).
The other problem that happens is that some people don't release their source code (they may release binaries) because either they're embarrassed by it, or because they want to maintain competitive advantage....