sociologists and property rights

Brayden

Jeremy Freese, crusader for transparency and accountability in sociological research, draws attention to a new article in the American Psychologist. The article reports that, when asked to share data from a recently published study, only 27% of psychologists were willing to do so. Jeremy wonders if sociologists are any more altruistic/willing to share their data. In the comments that follow several sociologists reveal that they can understand why sociologists who collect their own data would not be willing to share. From the comments:

“we have slower publication queues in sociology and, in some subfields, greater time investments in the data collection itself (e.g., years to collect and code data from primary sources, as opposed to a semester or less to run a psych experiment). Given this, you’d expect sociologists who rely on primary data collection to be a bit slower to release it, simply to give them more time to recoup their investments.

If your campaign for greater accountability is successful, will it have the unintended consequence of reducing sociologists’ motivation to invest in collecting new data?”

and

“The general questions, I guess, are: what are the costs of data collection, who bears these costs, and do they (costs and their nature) have an effect on their availability?”

and

“Data are often hard-won. If collected via field research, they sometimes represent years of investment by the researcher. That researcher has an obligation to dessiminate their results. But they also have a right to publish their results without having them be scooped or parasitized by arm-chair workers. This dilemma causes a lot of conflict in many fields.”

I don’t think I need to point out that this is the same logic that corporations use to defend their rights to patents. “If we sink costs into a particular innovation, shouldn’t we be allowed to recuperate those costs and make a profit?” Sociologists, who are often thought of as less self-interested than their economist colleagues, appeal to the same rationale. Is an economics-based argument for property rights so powerful (perhaps even correct) that even sociologists are convinced of it?