Google research chief pushes ‘big data’ : Nature News
In 2008, Google retreated from Palimpsest, its project for hosting open science data. Why?
I think we are still trying to figure out our role. It didn’t seem like there was momentum at the time for what we were offering. And scientists weren’t quite ready to share; or maybe they didn’t understand how or why they should share. So we didn’t see a lot of pick up for that service.
And maybe we were just a little bit too early. Maybe we can try again, or there can be another consortium to try again. It is a little bit tricky. For the most part, science is cooperative. But it’s also competitive.