Resumen
Although the principle of equal access to data is a key aspect of U.S. government-funded science policy, there are strong, institutionalized, though sometimes contradictory, incentives for investigators to maintain proprietary control over that data; there is also increasing commercial and in some cases federal pressure to treat data as a commodity. Efforts by the scientific community to prevent potentially deleterious international commercialization of scientific data through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have had some success, thanks to support from the U.S. State Department. A recent example is the Anti- Piracy Bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998 but never approved by the U.S. Senate, it was similar in some ways to the WIPO proposal. Related pressures continue to build, including from within the U.S. private sector. It seems the commercialization of scientific data and treating it as a commodity represent an increasingly important aspect of how scientific data is published today, further complicating this scenario is the growth of the Internet-based business sector and the increasing commercial value of the data itself especially biomedically significant data.