Item — HN Reader

Rewards for decent behaviour? What's holding 'that back' is an evident paucity of scientists (in this small area anyway) with integrity and a desire to discover the truth, come what may and irrespective of the views of their paymasters, relating to their speciality.

You ask for a mechanism to 'evaluate "impact" of linked data someone puts online'. I'm intrigued. What on earth do you have in mind? How would it work? On the face of it (I trust I've got this about face) it sounds an appalling idea. A load of value judgements delivered by whom?

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Just to be sure we're talking about the same thing: the article above is advocating that we all publish every detail of our research proceedings online. What I'm saying is, that doing that would jeopardize your position as a researcher: the average labjournal is full of thoughts and ideas for further work. Researchers however don't get rewarded for inspiring peers, they only get rewarded for doing the work.

If we want to encourage people to disclose all their data, we need to get rid of the system where grants, tenured posts, and awards are all based on authorships only.

I'm not sure which idea you think is appalling, as I don't have any idea as to how to do it! One way would be to establish something similar to PageRank: if you publish a database of, say, world-temperature readings, an indicator of its value might be how many online labjournals in the world draw data from it. That's a very raw idea, and obviously not good enough, but calling it appalling before I even came up with it?