Ten Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data

Goodman et al. on the importance of concise data curation and annotation:
Today, most research projects are considered complete when a journal article based on the analysis has been written and published. The trouble is, unlike Galileo's report in Sidereus Nuncius, the amount of real data and data description in modern publications is almost never sufficient to repeat or even statistically verify a study being presented. Worse, researchers wishing to build upon and extend work presented in the literature often have trouble recovering data associated with an article after it has been published. More often than scientists would like to admit, they cannot even recover the data associated with their own published works.