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Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

From my experience in the digital health sector, concerns for privacy is always the reason given for not sharing anything valuable and/or useful to others. But it's just a convenient way of hiding the 'desire of commercialisation'.

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this is also true, and it also runs within science itself. if someone spends two years collecting some data that is very hard to collect and it has a few papers worth of insights within it, they're going to want to keep that data private until they can get those papers out themselves lest someone else come along, download their data and scoop them before they have a chance to see the fruits of their hard labor.

while it's not great for science at large, i don't blame them either.

It's solvable if publishing the dataset counts as a paper, and citations of the dataset which should be required count as citations for e.g. tenure.

For example, ImageNet for machine learning is a very expensive and difficult data set to produce that has resulted in revolutionary advances in machine learning. And people build models on it, cite their results as evidence their models are good, and cite the paper.

This is an interesting idea. Although I am afraid that publishing a dataset, even a good one, will not be considered "real science" by our (broken) institutions.

You have a valid point here. It's probably utopian, but to me the only reasonable answer to this is to acknowledge that science is a collective process. Of course, this goes against the (stupid) idea that some extremely deserving geniuses are the ones that make science...

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