> People can share data in whatever format they have and it wouldn’t be hard for me or others to import it one way or another.
It's one thing for a highly-skilled user with a decade of experience to be able to import it eventually, another for an unskilled user to just have off-the-shelf tooling do it the same way for everyone automatically. This is more about meta-studies and unlocking new use cases. It sucks that the state-of-the-art for sharing academic microscopy data right now is basically looking at raster images embedded in PDFs, or email the authors, and then write a custom Scikit-Image script. Imagine if you had to read a PDF catalog and then email someone to order something off Amazon, or if your favorite CRUD app consisted instead of having an expert read a PDF and email a screenshots to you. What if sending those very emails to different recipients required implementing each users custom IMAP-like mail client. That sounds absurd, but it's kind of the way academic data sharing works now, lots of people are re-inventing the wheel and creating custom file formats.
Consider, for example, the work of Dr. Bik (example at [1]) who identifies cloned sections from microscopy data. Or what if, instead of each researcher having to generate their own images, or get lucky and remember a particular image there was a Getty Images/AP Newsroom platform where you could just filter for your particular subject and imaging parameters and share your data. A collection of proprietary RAW files with randomly-formatted Excel documents for metadata would allow individual researchers to get their work done, but would be pretty worthless in comparison.
It's one thing for a highly-skilled user with a decade of experience to be able to import it eventually, another for an unskilled user to just have off-the-shelf tooling do it the same way for everyone automatically. This is more about meta-studies and unlocking new use cases. It sucks that the state-of-the-art for sharing academic microscopy data right now is basically looking at raster images embedded in PDFs, or email the authors, and then write a custom Scikit-Image script. Imagine if you had to read a PDF catalog and then email someone to order something off Amazon, or if your favorite CRUD app consisted instead of having an expert read a PDF and email a screenshots to you. What if sending those very emails to different recipients required implementing each users custom IMAP-like mail client. That sounds absurd, but it's kind of the way academic data sharing works now, lots of people are re-inventing the wheel and creating custom file formats.
Consider, for example, the work of Dr. Bik (example at [1]) who identifies cloned sections from microscopy data. Or what if, instead of each researcher having to generate their own images, or get lucky and remember a particular image there was a Getty Images/AP Newsroom platform where you could just filter for your particular subject and imaging parameters and share your data. A collection of proprietary RAW files with randomly-formatted Excel documents for metadata would allow individual researchers to get their work done, but would be pretty worthless in comparison.
[1] https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2023/06/27/concerns-about...