{"id":1754,"date":"2009-09-17T23:06:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T23:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/09\/17\/scooped\/"},"modified":"2009-09-17T23:06:24","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T23:06:24","slug":"scooped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/09\/17\/scooped\/","title":{"rendered":"Scooped"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being scooped is every researcher’s worst nightmare.
\nIt happened to me, once; less than three days before submitting my first paper from my postdoctoral lab, I spotted a new paper in press at my target journal, with substantially overlapping conclusions. Luckily I was so close to publication myself that there could be no doubt the work was independent – and there were some conclusions that were unique to my paper. This meant that we did still get the paper published (in a different journal), but not without some very stressful times. One of my labmates was not so lucky a year later; he was completely<\/em> scooped (by a different lab to the one that got me), and didn’t get a chance to even submit his paper.
\nSo my heart goes out to Professor Laura Bierut at Washington University in St. Louis, the victim of a scoop that made the news section of Science<\/em> this week<\/a>.
\nFor those of you who don’t have access to the original article, the story is that Professor Bierut had contributed data to a shared database. The federally funded project had a publication embargo in place, so that while other researchers could access and analyse the data, the contributors would get the first shot at publication. However, a researcher at a different institute breached the terms of this agreement, and submitted a paper based on Professor Bierut’s data a full six months before the embargo was due to expire.
\nThe offending paper has since been retracted, but it can’t be unpublished, and it remains available in the journal’s online archives. The NIH are investigating, and have frozen the other researcher’s access to the shared database until their review is complete.
\nThere have been some discussions of data sharing around these parts recently (see Bob’s recent post<\/a> for an example). There is obviously a great reluctance that needs to be overcome before free and open data sharing becomes widespread, and incidents like this one (even if unintentional) represent a major obstacle.
\nSo, assuming that data sharing is A Good Thing, who should shoulder the responsiblity of protecting the people who generate the data?<\/p>\n