Public sector information (PSI) aka government data access and sharing is culturally different than the sharing of data between and among scientists. And within science there are many different subgroups that have different takes on data sharing. This is also true when it comes to data preservation and archiving, and the consideration that all of these datasets are cultural heritage and national assets. One could argue that science data are also PSI or government data since most science is paid for with public research dollars. There is of course foundation money as well, and these too have a different data sharing culture.

The Online September issue of Nature is dedicated to the topic of data sharing in the sciences. Note, that does not necessarily include geomatics data, and yes folks, again a different data sharing culture.

Bref – different information ecologies and attention structures dictate how members of data creator communities do things.