andrewducker

I suspect there'll be a lag while funding bodies catch up to the existence of open access and find new ways of judging quality.

Yep, a major one I expect. The university now has a policy in place to support open access publishing which is a big step forward from my last institution but I suspect the funding bodies won't move until there is a sea change in the publishing world regarding Impact Factors. From the whiff off the edge of the debate I picked up at the conference in SF last month, there are stirrings behind the scenes on that front but it'll take come major players to come on board before that becomes anything more than a few titles opting out of the whole nonsense. As far as the life sciences stuff is concerned, the open access people seem to be having a big debate about peer review too which will feed into this. That one is getting bigger though, with the recent scandals over faked reviews.

You say "cold and dead inside" like it's a bad thing.

Like Dexter, the best of us have learned to use our sociopathic gifts for good. Mostly.

I certainly don't think people should be _made_ to care about things. That would be awful. Even if the things are people :->

>Engineers are cold and dead inside. (See also: Why are so many terrorists engineers?)

I knew it! Good thing I'm in a caring profession like coding!

How do academics feel about publishing the database? I would have thought it was just like publishing the code, but I've written to workers in the past (where they've published papers giving e.g. averages, and I wanted to see what the averages had been made up of), and they've been open about intending to hang on to the data and publish more papers based on it.

Oh, I'm sure some would resist doing so.

But if enough people said that they wouldn't trust the finished article without the complete data, that would push things.