In January, I joined the members of the Public Health Research Data Forum here in London to present the findings of our research into existing capacity for research data management in low- and medium income countries.

One of the questions we had to answer early was posed by Tom Plewes of the National Academy of Science. He presented a report, written in 1985, with the optimistic title "Sharing Research Data". Just in case you didn't realise how long ago that was, the cover features an only 1.2Mb floppy disk.