Abstract
Open-access databases with utility in fisheries
science have grown exponentially in quantity and scope over the
past decade, with profound impacts to our discipline. The management,
distillation, and sharing of an exponentially growing
stream of open-access data represents several fundamental
challenges in fisheries science. Many of the currently available
open-access resources may not be universally known among
fisheries scientists. We therefore introduce many national- and
global-scale open-access databases with applications in fisheries
science and provide an example of how they can be harnessed
to perform valuable analyses without additional field
efforts. We also discuss how the development, maintenance, and
utilization of open-access data are likely to pose technical, financial,
and educational challenges to fisheries scientists. Such
cultural implications that will coincide with the rapidly increasing
availability of free data should compel the American Fisheries
Society to actively address these problems now to help ease
the forthcoming cultural transition.