To Share or Not to Share

To Share or Not to Share

Researchers grapple with the value—and risk—of sharing unpublished data at conferences.

By Heather Boerner

Spencer Cushen’s data was generating the kind of interest that a PhD candidate might hope for at Experimental Biology (EB). It should have been a highlight of his career. Indeed, it was a defining moment, but not in the way you might expect.

“I felt like I was prey almost,” says Cushen, who is getting his PhD at the University of North Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

That’s because as the 2019 conference wore on, researchers more senior—faculty members and junior scientists who had already received their PhDs—started taking photos of his poster, with still unpublished data. Sometimes they talked to him about his findings. Some grad students snapped photos and walked away.

All he could think was, “It’s my dissertation. I have to publish it to graduate.”

As social media changes the way people share data, Cushen isn’t alone in grappling with the impact of smartphones and the easy dissemination of unpublished data online. At this year’s APS Annual Meeting at EB, new rules around data sharing will be implemented, allowing presenters to state at the beginning of their presentations or note on their posters whether they will permit photos to be taken of unpublished work.

Then, it’s up to attendees to honor the presenters’ wishes. Whether the precaution is necessary—whether anyone’s data really has been scooped from photos taken at conferences—is unclear. But it’s time to start having the conversation, says Robert Hester, PhD, APS’ outgoing Joint Program Committee chair.

“This year,” he says, “the idea is to have a discussion.”

Stiff Competition

The world in which Cushen is presenting data is different than it was when Hester began in the field years ago. “Twenty years ago, no one thought data had economic value,” says Hester, professor of physiology and interim chair of data science at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. “Nowadays, data is everything”—the key to grants, publications and, in some cases, patents.

That’s in part because the competition is so stiff today, he says. Over the past decade or longer, the annual budgets of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have failed to keep pace with the rate of inflation, meaning that both agencies have lost purchasing power. At the same time, the size of the scientific workforce has grown faster than federal research budgets, with the end result being more competition for grants. The chance of getting a research project grant funded by the NIH fell from 32 percent in fiscal year (FY) 2000 to 20 percent in FY 2018, meaning that only 1 out of every 5 grant applications submitted receives funding.

“One of my mentors used to say that when people are hungry, they lose their manners around the dinner table,” says Stella Goulopoulou, PhD, assistant professor of physiology and anatomy at the University of North Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. “Right now, science is underfunded. People may be close to losing their manners.”

Meanwhile, with the increased sharing of data, universities and researchers are more protective of their intellectual property (IP), says Hester, who chairs the IP committee at the University of Mississippi. In the 1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created the provisional patent to protect IP as researchers develop their findings. Once you file a provisional patent, the clock starts ticking. You have one year to file the full patent.

When your provisional patent is on file, “it’s a whole lot easier to submit an idea” to a conference, Hester says.

And then there’s publication. “Published work is pretty much our currency—how we’re evaluated for everything,” Cushen says.

If a journal withdraws its interest in publishing because a competitor publishes similar data elsewhere—or because a more experienced researcher can duplicate the work faster than a trainee—it can bring a very sudden end to years of research.

For Cushen, who is relying on this data to earn his degree, when people were taking photos of his work, the fear of losing all of that control of the data “felt 100 percent real to me.”

A few months after Cushen’s presentation, Goulopoulou, Cushen’s mentor, emailed with what she thought was good news. Another lab was submitting data for another conference that was “very in line with what we do,” Goulopoulou says.

“This is great,” she told Cushen. “Maybe we can talk to them.”

But Cushen wasn’t cheerful. “Oh,” he said. “These are the people who were taking pictures of my poster.”

He had never felt comfortable with strangers taking pictures of his findings. “I was naïve,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll let anyone take photos of my work again.”

An N of 1

There’s no way to know what role Cushen’s research had in the work of the other lab, of course—if it played any at all. Cushen and Goulopoulou say that researchers work along similar tracks all the time.

Certainly not every picture taken at a conference ends up on social media or in another lab’s published work. And there may be good reasons for people to take photos at conferences, says Christina Bennett, PhD, APS publication director, policy.

For instance, attendees who are not native English speakers may need more time to read the information on a slide. Others may take a picture to review the results at a later time or share it with lab-mates who were unable to attend the meeting. The intent is not the same as attempting to replicate the findings quickly and publish them as their own work. It may also be a generational thing: Younger researchers may take notes by taking photos instead of writing, Hester says.

If you look at the Twitter account of W. David Merryman, PhD, Walters Family Chair of Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering, pharmacology, medicine and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., it’s full of photos of the researchers from his lab.

He’s also one of those conference attendees you see with his phone in the air taking photos of slides. But a review of his Twitter account for more than a year shows that he doesn’t post those photos online—though he has retweeted photos of findings from his own lab. From his perspective, “this is widely known,” he says. “Everyone takes pictures.”

So when Goulopoulou, a member of the APS Science Policy Committee, tweeted at a September conference, “Please don’t take pictures of presenters’ unpublished data and hypothesis-diagrams and then post them in social media. Ask their permission first,” with the hashtag #ConferenceGroundRules, Merryman’s response was decisive.

“I would have the opposite advice: assume anything you present at a conf/seminar will be shared without regard. If you don’t want it seen yet, don’t show it,” he tweeted back.

He was surprised by Goulopoulou’s tweet, he says. For one thing, pre-print databases and bioarchives make it so people can lay claim to their work even before it’s officially published. For another, publications such as eLife now offer “scoop protection”—they won’t pull publication of a paper that’s in review if someone else publishes similar data. Plus, provisional patents give scientists an opportunity to protect their work and share it with the field.

Many projects his trainees are working on can take up to five years to complete. Prohibiting them from presenting out of fear of being scooped is a “complete disservice” to them, he says.

He says there are lots of benefits of presenting data, even data that may be new: You might connect with other researchers, get tips on methods or ideas for how to proceed, or discover opportunities to collaborate.

“If scientific leaders see your presentation, they can learn who you are, learn your work,” he says. “Those are the people who are reviewing your fellowship idea. There’s a human element here. If you keep your PhD students locked up, they never get that chance.”

Still, he says, if data is particularly sensitive or pivotal, you may want to hold off on presenting until you’re closer to publication. And he acknowledges that his take on this now as an endowed chair is probably different than it would have been when he was a trainee.

“For the junior people, it may seem much more risky than for people further in their careers,” Merryman says. “When you’re a junior researcher, you’re an n of 1 and you only have yourself to consider. When you’re the leader of a large lab, you can see the benefit of sharing data more widely and see the data from trainees move the field forward.”

A Scientific Honor System

Following Goulopoulou’s tweet, others, such as Swapnil Hiremath, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, pushed back on Goulopoulou’s tweet but ended the tweet with, “Would respect if the presenter says don’t tweet, needless to say.”

This is the cost-benefit analysis that both early-career and established researchers must navigate, Bennett says. “It’s a balance. You attend meetings and share data to learn and move the field forward,” she says. “If no one shared their unpublished findings, conferences may hold less value for attendees who are looking to gain new scientific insights.”

That’s the environment in which the new APS conference data-sharing policy is being suggested. It may be that the new policy is a solution in search of a problem, Hester says. But we won’t know until we talk about it.

“Some may say we’re blowing this up out of proportion,” he says. “We have no evidence as far as I know.” To him, the point is not the photos in particular; it’s the lack of conversation.

“The biggest thing at EB is net-working,” he says. “You get to talk about their science, your science, potentially do projects together. Say you have this mouse strain I’d like to use. Well, that’s fine. I can help with that and send some mice to you to breed. But with EB, my concern is that taking pictures isn’t that. It’s not the true definition of collaboration.”

Hester suggests that, rather than starting a session with your phone out, instead start it with a conversation: Approach someone and explain why you’re interested in their work. Ask for their presentation. That both spreads the research and makes connections that could be important later.

In the end, though, Hester says that both his recommendations and the APS policy are just suggestions. “There’s no way to enforce this.”

And that’s where, Goulopoulou says, the scientific honor system comes in. “Most people don’t mean anything bad” in taking photos at conferences, she says. “My response is just to bring this up: How do you participate in this honor system? Any society has rules—what are the rules? The goal is to keep the honor system and still trust each other.”

This article was originally published in the January 2020 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.