Modifier Nouns: -s or no -s?

So typically in English you can "stack" nouns to the left of the main noun and make them into modifiers, like so:

Instead of:

 a study that is funded by NCI, focused on cancer, long term, a prospective cohort, and ongoing

You can say:

a long-term, ongoing, NCI-funded, cancer-focused prospective cohort study

(And we could keep going all day with the stacking -- if we wanted too, although as your editor, I would advise against it!)

Typically, as part of this process, you lose the final "-s" on plural nouns. For example, if you were discussing the "quality controls" implemented in your lab:

Incorrect:

*quality controls procedures

Correct:

quality control procedures

Where this process gets sticky is when you have a collective noun that looks like a plural (and ends in "-s") but that is grammatically singular. Especially sticky, in my experience, are such nouns created from adjectives. Recent examples of these that have made their way across my editing desk include "bioinformatics", "proteomics", and -- more recently -- "metabolomics".

These are nifty, exciting-sounding nouns. I like them! However, they make for rather awkward noun stacking:

Correct (??):

*?metabolomics assay

I never quite know. It's awkward and weird-sounding to my ear, because as an adjective-derived noun, "metabolomics" and its cousins retain their adjectivalness just enough that I want to change the example above to "metabolomic assay". But that doesn't have quite the same meaning, so I end up leaving it alone. And wincing ever so slightly every time I re-read it.

 Ah, the life of an editor! Forever twitching over minutiae...


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Open Data

"Open Access" to published scientific reports -- especially reports produced using government funds -- has been a topic for heated debate for a number of years. More recently, I've come across an equally heated debate on Twitter about "Open Data". Open Data, similar to its sibling Open Access, asserts that researchers should make the data they collect, clean, and organize freely and publicly available. There are variations in how this should look. Some would have datasets published along with manuscripts. Some would have them posted on an institutional website. Others would have datasets "accessible", but only through a gateway through which interested parties would submit an analysis request to the original researchers, who would do the actual analysis and send the results to the requester.

I can see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, I think publicly funded research should absolutely be made public and freely accessible -- at least, at some point in its life. On the other hand, I think the original researchers should retain credit for the work they did collecting, cleaning, and organizing.

There are deeper issues too. There is the potential for a negative impact on the career paths of researchers whose data "goes public", since their capacity to publish from their data is going to decrease as the number of people with access to their data increases. That is not to say that researchers should be allowed to sit on their data in perpetuity either, but it seems to me that there ought to be balance struck.

Also, there is a particularly sticky issue with human genetic datasets. A tremendous amount of public resources have been and will continue to be poured into genotyping, sequencing, etc. to ferret out the "host" causes of human disease. Shouldn't this data be accessible to as many people as possible, so we can accelerate the process of identifying how genes affect human health? Well, maybe. Then again, is it really ethical to make genotyping and sequencing data fully accessible to anyone on the internet when we know that it is now possible to identify individuals from such data?

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