For 2024, the theme of Open Access Week continues the call to put “Community over Commercialization” and prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community. As a fully Open Access institutional data repository, Deep Blue Data was built to serve the best interests of the public, our depositors and their academic communities. We partner with scholars to bring data into the world in a way that is comprehensible, trustworthy and useful.
When we asked our community, in a series of depositor interviews, why data sharing is important, most respondents gave collectively-minded answers taking the good of the field and scholarship in general into account, such as research reproducibility, transparency, and progress through collaboration. They talked about making real change in the world for the better, be it more accurate climate modeling or contributing to directly saving lives, as well as more generally building confidence in the process of research. They mentioned the next generation of scholars, and how sharing data supports and attracts new researchers, creates a more inclusive research landscape, demonstrates fulfillment of an ethical responsibility, and allows more people to benefit from the labor that already goes into conducting research; and how open data is integral to the future success of research under new technologies such as machine learning.
In a time of diminishing social connections and trust, our researchers (and the mission of our open access data repository) continue to demonstrate belief in a greater good, where doing what is right is ultimately more fruitful than focusing on what is expedient. We’ll give the last words to one of our depositors:
“I believe we have been shown over and over throughout history that humans as a species have prospered whenever they have shared knowledge and resolved the boundaries against it. While producing exclusive science can lead to profit, it will by and large slow down our progress as a species.” - Dr. Amir Salaree, in Solving a Seismic Mystery with a Diver’s Camera