Slashdot Mirror
UK University Researchers Must Make Data Available
Sara Chan writes "In a landmark ruling, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has decided that researchers at a university must make all their data available to the public. The decision follows from a three-year battle by mathematician Douglas J. Keenan, who wants the data to do his own analysis on it. The university researchers have had the data for many years, and have published several papers using the data, but had refused to make the data available. The data in this case pertains to global warming, but the decision is believed to apply to any field: scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property."
There's more at the BBC, at Nature Climate Feedback, and at Keenan's site.
Does this mean every biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering research group (I'm talking about grad students and postdocs, here) would have to open their lab notebooks to anyone who asked?
Researchers who ply their trade on the cutting edge of science live in perpetual fear of being "scooped" by another group who publishes their discovery first. These are sometimes literally "races." So now a group at one university could demand access to the notebooks of a group at another university? And vice versa?
Not at all.
It means they have access to each others results and source data when published (once the group is done researching this phase, and is ready to publish). There's no "opening notebooks", simply because that's a terrible metaphor for how data is collected these days.
You only have to publish your data after publishing your article, which means "you won". You don't have to publish data for a research in progress.
Even worse, some hack might shove the data through some perl code:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7028418.ece
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Michael Mann used the same tree ring data as temperature proxies for his studies and has published papers on this. But now the very same scientists who collected the tree ring data claim that data cannot be used as a temperature proxies - even though they haven't mentioned a word about how this would invalidate Michael Mann's work.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/21/mann-of-oak/#more-10811
That is indeed an issue. Presumably the methodology is already published, as is the rule for scientific papers.
There is at least one case in =two climate research papers where what the methodologies claimed was impossible because the data to do it didn't even exist. This didn't come out for 16 years, and was only discovered because a FOI request was finally honored.
In this case, the authors of the papers had claimed that the station data that they used was from stations that had "few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times." (quote from one paper) and "selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times" (quote from the other paper)
"Hey! We only used great data!"
Now, these two authors used the same data, and one of these authors was actually a co-author of the other paper. These authors are Jones (hello climate gate) and Wang.
Now, they finally sourced the data as being from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which coincedentally had co-published a report with the US Department of Energy at about the same time as those two research papers, stating quite specifically that DATA OF THAT QUALITY DID NOT EXIST. The report was specifically about the quality of the Chinese climate record.
Both papers concluded that the Urban Heat Island effect was minimal. Too bad that they didn't actually have data good enough to draw that conclusion. They said they did, tho.
None of this would have come out if it wasn't for the Freedom of Information Act. Jones and Wang both obstructed the release of the data (denying FOI requests, etc) for nearly 2 decades.
This all came out several years ago, but the media didnt give a fuck. They did care about hacked emails tho. Go figure. Now, as it turns out it probably wasn't Jones who was lying his ass off. Wang was a co-author on Jones's paper and supplied the "data." Jones gets credit for having his email hacked.
"His name was James Damore."
The issue with the FoIA in the UK is that there is a clause requiring bodies to only have to comply with the request if the cost of fulfilling it is not more than around £450.
I've seen first hand local government abuse this by claiming that collation of the data would take 18 hours and that their FoI officer is paid £25 an hour, and hence the cost of providing the data is too high. Quite why it requires someone paid £50k a year to collate some basic data that they should already have collated anyway I've no idea, but still, they use this excuse, and the information commissioner allows such abuse of it.
So although as you say it's a great theoretical win, I believe it'll make no difference in practice either way due to the ease of which public bodies are able to sidestep FoI requests.