On the flip side, at least uploading the data to a third-party means that (while I’m alive at least) I won’t be able to mislay the data. I’ve asked for data from papers from several years ago, and while the authors were, in principle, happy to give it to me, they weren’t able to find it. I wonder though whether this should be the role of the journal and supporting information, rather than a third-party site.

You said,

“This bascally is plagiarism, and if you detect that, bring it up with the journal editor and get justice.”

You also said,

“If they ‘forget’ to cite you then they are breeching license and copyright and you have every right to take it to court if you like.”

First, I have neither the time nor the inclination to ‘police’ the literature monitoring the behavior of the unethical types who would be inclined to “borrow” data without bothering to cite the source. Second, why in the world would I want to take on the burden of having to seek justice with editors when I can pre-empt the use my data illicitly by clicking the closed box. As I said, if someone wants it, THEY can go to the trouble of e-mailing me to get it. That might even spawn a collaborative interaction! If that’s too much work, I guess they really didn’t need it or want the data all that badly. Third, why should I go to the trouble and expense to try to take someone to court when they may well and probably would be in some other country and could thumb their nose at the illegality of their behavior.

There are three reasons why I’m not going to change my position on the open/closed posting of my data, Egon. As I said, feel completely free to disagree with me but I’m not about to change my position. In my not so spare time I’m also a professional photographer and I’ve had to deal several times with imbeciles who think they can download and use someone else’s work without permission or credit. Photographs are a whole lot easier to recognize than data files. In one instance, a friend in Australia spotted the illicit use of one of my images and brought it to my attention. In that case the guilty party complained that I was being unduly harsh when I sent a letter to her webhosting service demanding that she remove my copyrighted material from her commercial website. Personally, I’m going to preclude the problem of inappropriate usage insofar as my data is concerned by opting for the closed check box. If that means that I have a closed mind on the open data issue, so be it.

Also, Open data *is* Copyrighted, and there are many licenses which allow you to *require* to be cited, such as the CC-BY license [1]. If the ‘forget’ to cite you then, the are breeching license and copyright, and you have every right to take it to court if you like.

I understand your concern, but it is absolutely *no* reason to not make your data Open.

1.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

As far as unsymmetrical indirect covariance processing, the capabilities are still being explored by us and have been the subject of a string of papers this year in Magn. Reson. Chem. You can, for example, take an HSQC and COSY spectrum and coprocess them together to derive an HSQC-COSY spectrum analogous to the low sensitivity HSQC-TOCSY spectrum in much less time and with much higher overall sensitivity (see for exmaple, J. Het. Chem., 44, 163-166 (2006) or J. Nat. Prod, 70, 1393-1396 (2007)).

By the way, I didn’t know that about unsymmetrical indirect covariance processing methods. It seems that this would be a very useful service to provide calculated 2D NMR spectra for a variety of compounds. Maybe something ChemSpider could do…