Comment by geoalchimista | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoalchimista | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I don't think GitHub is to be blamed for how scientists use it. AFAIK there are data repositories more suitable for the purpose of sharing data sets and metadata, and out of the hands of big corporations (but may subject to big governments), e.g., Zenodo (funded by CERN) and DataONE (funded by NSF). Zenodo can even generate a DOI for your data set, which GitHub does not do.

That being said, I think this Nature report adds nothing new to the narrative. Sure, open science is great, but who's gonna pay for it? Neither GitHub nor Microsoft is a charity. Since most of the research mentioned in this article are funded by government, they should go to the data repositories that are designed to store data derived from publicly funded research. GitHub just wasn't designed for that purpose.

Microsoft Research is one of the largest supporters of academic computer science research in the world, and is a non-trivial funding source for many non-CS academic fields as well.

“Why don’t scientists use modern tools like GitHub, instead of these crap bespoke ones? They shouldn’t waste their time duplicating effort.”

“Why are scientists using inappropriate tools? These are for commercial use only!”

In practice, GitHub works fine for collaborative code projects and sharing data over the next few years. If you’re looking to store large amounts of data over long periods, you’re right.

If GitHub don’t want to support science (they’re just a business) then they should stop giving free products to academia eh.

Don't make a straw man argument. I said none of the above. I'm NOT against open science. And I am glad that GitHub supports open science. In fact, GitHub does offer free private repositories to researchers who have an .edu email address.

I see it mostly as a summary of the "common wisdom"; it has been a mantra for years that you should "just put it on github", but now that Mircosoft has reminded us all of how cynical the world truly is, suddenly the scientists that paid attention before are to blame?

Not cool to insert fake quotes as if you are quoting the person you’re responding to.

I think it's a pretty normal shorthand, especially when readers can see for themselves that you aren't quoting them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com