Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"

Comments

real government research goals

[MyRuger]

Obviously you have never written an SBIR or BAA. You when you do research "At the tax payers expense", you need to show your plans to commercialize the results of the research. The government wants you to create a IP twoards a commerial project which will spur the economy, not to contribute to the scientific community as a whole. Take it as you will, but I think that most research would not get funded if your commertilization plan was to release it on sourceforge.

taxpayers vs boffins

[dos_dude]

This is an extremely difficult issue, although it sounds pretty trivial.

For one thing, the taxpayer is rarely participating in discussions like this one. Moreover, the success of scientific institutions is often measured in terms of number of patents, successfully launched businesses by former students/researchers, etc. So not only is there little or no opposition to closed-source software (or scientific articles!), there are also good reasons for researchers to go the closed-source road.

Some researchers have a tendency towards secrecy. Some even seem a little paranoid when it comes to their data and methods. You could compare this to the tendency of the OSS zealot to suspect bugs, glitches, and omissions in any piece of closed-source software.

And as a German side-note: There are laws over here that require you to have the patentability of any piece of software you develop checked by university lawyers. GPLing something is technically illegal for a researcher. I have no idea how this is regulated in other countries.

with open source, everyone can see you're dumb

[Nick Barnes]

See this debunking of McKitrick's work, showing, among other things, how he:

• denies that average temperature is meaningful,
• confuses degrees with radians,
• invents a whole new temperature scale,
• replaces missing data with zeroes

Re:If you were wondering what real scientists thin

[jnaujok]

You do know that Mann writes this website, right? You do realize that the source of your argument (http://www.realclimate.org/) is a shill for Mann and his cronies?

Second of all, there was a flaw in the original algorithm that was pointed out by McIntyre and McKitrick before they even got to the bad data being put into the equation.

And, to top it off, Mann's equation always produces hockey-stick graphs, even with randomly distributed data.

Don't point at Mann's own site as a defense of Mann.