“Publish or perish”: Should this still be true for your data?

The past decades have witnessed an era of data explosion that touches almost every aspects of modern science. Powerful technologies such as Next-gen DNA sequencing, high throughput/content screening platforms, the Large Hadron Collider and more, routinely generate copious amounts of data. At the same time, collaborations between different disciplines had never been so urgently needed to provide new insights that otherwise would not be possible. We are in need of a revolution in publication infrastructure towards supporting researchers with the means to preserve and gain access to research output. In this context, Elsevier has proudly launched Data in Brief, an open access journal that publishes data from a broad spectrum of disciplines including Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Psychology and Physics. Data in Brief strives to provide a platform for researchers to easily share and reuse each other's datasets, promote collaboration across disciplines and to showcase the benefits of data driven research. I have personally experienced research in both academic and industrial settings. If I were asked to single out one thing that impressed me most about pharmaceutical industry, it will be the systematic approach the industry adopted for collecting research and clinical data. Bringing a drug to the market heavily relies on the data collected during the research and development process. Once data are generated in pharmaceutical institute, they are pooled into a centralized database together with very detailed lab note descriptions of the protocols, experimental designs, and analysis. The pharmaceutical industry has spared no efforts in centralizing data to facilitate decision-making as well as innovation. For example, we collect hundreds of assay data around a specific compound and place them in a single webpage to facilitate decision making on how to optimizing the lead compound. I can easily pull out a complete raw dataset for an experiment done 20 years ago as my reference in Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). The push for data sharing and archiving in academia is starting to pick up speed and could benefit from the lessons already learned in industry. It is still the case that data generated in an academic setting may sit in the lab for decades without being published or known to the outside world, waiting for a " story " that could never be completed. Personally, I still have a lot of interesting data from my Ph.D. study yet to be published, which could have provided insights for other researchers …