Alternative post title: tell me again what data sharing is for?

Recently I polled y’all on whether providers of data on public repositories such as Dryad are entitled to co-authorship of any future papers that use those data. I was motivated to poll on this because of my sense that both data-sharing, and authorship practices in ecology, are changing. I’m interested in the interplay of those changes. And whenever practices or norms are in the midst of changing, we can expect substantial disagreement about the changes. Anyway, here are the poll results, along with some commentary.

Sample size and profile of the respondents

We got 280 responses (thanks everyone who responded!). Not a random sample from any well-defined population obviously, not even “the population of readers of Dynamic Ecology.” But still, it’s a larger and probably more representative sample of ecologists than you could get just by reading social media or asking your friends’ opinions, so it seems worth talking about.

This blog has lost grad student readership over the years, so the respondents skewed more heavily senior than respondents to our polls used to do. Respondents were 41% faculty, 28% postdocs, and 17% grad students. Also 8.5% non-academic professional ecologists, and 5% other.

Read the rest of this discussion piece