 NSF and other granting agencies have decided that the data that are gathered under grants from these agencies are public data. And this is basically a good idea because the data can be used and reused in ways not even imagine by the investigator when he or she does their research. However, making these data available can be difficult because I've been in the business for a while and in my lab I have punch cards, I have magnetic tapes, I have five and a quarter inch floppies, I have data on three and a half inch floppies, I have data on zip desk, thumb drives, DVDs, CDs, all sorts. My data is stored in all sorts of formats and programs and things of that sort which effectively means that these data really aren't retrievable anymore. And they can't be used by other investigators. Generally the half-life of any researcher is rather short and it turns out that the data storage formats are even shorter. So NSF says you don't actually own the data, the data are public data. And I agree with that, it's a good idea. Wherever we have public data available to the public it's been used and used in tremendously interesting ways.