This gets my goat. It’s not a favor: if you’ve taken NIH funding to develop the reagent in question, or published it in most journals, you are REQUIRED to provide it to fellow researchers at nominal cost. It’s part of your job, a contractual obligation. Anyone who doesn’t do this (or does it in a sloppy fashion, deliberately or because they’re simply a lousy scientist) is failing in their professional duties.

It’s amazing to me that it’s taken this long to sort of start generating significant interest in validated, standardized, open repositories

Try this exercise: wherever you work, try to put together a plasmid repository, or a list of antibodies that are on hand. Note that this is far, far simpler than developing an actual repository of the physical reagents.

If you don’t get zero uptake, plus some egregious hostility and whining (”why would I make it easier for people to ask me for stuff?”; “what if someone takes advantage of all my work?”), then I want to work where you work.

There used to be a web app for reagent sharing, called BioRoot; it had a fully-featured database back end, security, Excel upload, the works; I wrote about it here. When I tried to get my colleagues to use it, I got the response I described; as far as I can tell, it’s now dead from lack of use. It seems that everyone is just too damn busy with their own Big Important Stuff, and too damn poisoned by our hypercompetitive environment, to bother with something that might benefit someone else.

Feh. What gives me enough hope to keep pushing these ideas is grad students like you, who have not yet been beaten hollow and filled back up with cynicism and spite.