The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Last week I attended the ‘Data Debate‘ at Imperial College London, hosted by the Index on Censorship. Baroness Onara O’Neill, Sir Mark Walport, George Monbiot and Professor David Colquhoun formed a distinguished panel that took on the question of whether transparency was bad for science.

While all panellists argued that transparency and openness were essential to the progress of scientific research, Baroness O’Neill, the first speaker, raised some  concerns over the cost of opening up data and privacy issues around data release. Baroness O’Neill’s further contention that decisions to open up data must be based on considerations about the competency of those for whom the data is intended was strongly contested by other members of the panel. It led to the most heated exchange of the night which took place between George Monbiot and Baroness O’Neill over the question of whose decision it was to judge the competency of others and withhold data accordingly.

In the debate that followed, academic publishers came up for heavy criticism for their unwillingness to open up the data they publish and make it easily accessible to the public. George Monbiot and David Colquhoun rounded on them for hiding publicly funded research behind prohibitively expensive pay walls. Colquhoun quoted an astounding statistic that sent the Twitter stream at the event into overdrive: ‘UCL.’ he said, ‘paid Elsevier €1.25m a year for e-journal access’. Coloquhoun also questioned why it was not mandatory to publish the results of clinical trials once they have been finished, labelling it ‘outrageous’ that the results from only 17% of cancer clinical trials have been made available.

While it would have been interesting to hear the panellists discuss the emerging technologies for more proactive and cost effective sharing of raw scientific data the debate was engaging and thoroughly enjoyable. The Index on Censorship has now released a full video of the debate which can be viewed at the top of this post and is well worth watching.