Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_hirner | Hacker News Reader

To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain. The current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian.

View on HN

Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub which is becoming more and more popular at least in my field. GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? GitHub is just not made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run for profit. Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record.

> GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...?

Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.

Many people leave academia after a post-doc or two, most actually. These people will not have any incentive to manage their research data for the rest of their lives and the data will eventually be lost, unless GitHub continues to exist in its current form for the next half century, with is rather unlikely. For this reason we need dedicated research repositories that are managed by publicly funded non-profits. Zenodo.org is one example but I'm not sure if they have long-term funding.

The whole idea of git is that it is decentralized. So, even if GitHub instantaneously shut downs and erases all data (unlikely, they'd probably give a few months for people to move their repos), people's copies of the repo can be uploaded to servers.

Bigchaindb is tackling generic open data repositories from a technical pov. As has been said below, the larger part of the sustenance prob is economical of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com