Hello, As I mentioned a couple months ago, I met some fellow scientists at a conference, and asked them to continue development their wildlife image analyses program as Free Software (as in Freedom). I was glad that they were receptive to the idea (even though they keep going back to calling it "open source".... oh well), so I think this is a good first step! At the moment they are still looking for funding for their next stage of software development, so not much new progress has been made (though if you know of funding sources for developing scientific Free Software please do tell!).
However, in our conference call today about this software, one of our colleagues brought up the issue of the *data* that's being processed by the software. According to him, there will be two problems: (1) If the data is released to the wider public, there might be other scientists who would "steal" the data, publish the work/analyses on it, preempt our efforts, and we won't end up being able to publish any papers. Since peer-reviews scientific journal papers are the "currency" with which academic performance is judged, we shouldn't release our data because others might "steal" them. He said we should at the very least embargo and restrict access to the data for e.g. five years before releasing them. (2) Since a lot of the data are photos of wild animals, what if some of the animals are endangered or sensitive to human encroachment? Since GPS metadata is associated with our images, what is a poacher sees our data and use it to hunt down the endangered animal? He said maybe we shouldn't release the data at all/ever, doing so would be "irresponsible" and possibly cause great harm. Be default, I think all scientific data should be completely released under the equivalent of a CC-BY-SA 4.0 Intl license, or even into the public domain. But when my colleague raised points (1) and (2) above, I couldn't think of any good rebuttal! I realise this mailing list focuses on Free Software, but in this case I think the liberation of the *data* that the software processes is very important, too. So, what do people think about points (1) and (2)? If the expertise is not on this mailing list, is there another place/forum where I can discuss the issue of Free Data (as in Freedom), "open data", and "open access"??? Thank you!
