Author: Patricia A. Soranno, Kendra S. Cheruvelil, Kevin C. Elliott, Georgina M. Montgomery
Publisher: BioScience
Publication Year: 2015
Summary: The following article discusses how many times we are concerned with the ethics of oversharing data, but there are also ethical issues when it comes to undersharing. In many scientific fields we are seeing an increase in data being shared, however, when it comes to environmental science, very little is being shared. While many scientists feel that it is their ethical obligation to share their data to the public, environmental scientists do not feel there has been an ethical concern from the public for their data to be shared. However, in many ways it can be unethical to not make this data public. Especially with the major concern of climate change, there has been a lot of environmental research done that should be shared with the public because it has the chance of leading to an improvement. We should be aware that data sharing is not the ‘norm’ for all fields yet, and that we can work on implementing that ethical obligation of sharing in order for more changes and positive impacts to be made for the general population.
