Tangential to topic, but I have been reading a Newton biography (Never at Rest) recently, and I found it interesting how reliant Newton was on the observations of other scientists. He had correspondence with scientists like Halley and Flamsteed on the basis of getting their observations of comets or observations of the moon, to help him work out orbits.

At one point, Newton was unhappy with Flamsteed, because Flamsteed wanted to work on his star map instead of Newton's moon observations, but Flamsteed said he needed an accurate star map to produce accurate moon observations.

Data sharing has been an issue in science for hundreds of years.