In January, the editor of a top medical journal ignited a furious social media backlash by referring to “research parasites” – people who didn’t personally run a clinical trial or collect data but “use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers.”
The New England Journal of Medicine quickly backtracked and clarified its wholehearted support of data sharing, but the hashtag #Iamaresearchparasite quickly rippled across the Internet, with people as prominent as the White House’s chief data scientist and the editor of the prestigious journal Science claiming membership in this select society of scientific bottom-feeders.
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