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.

Comments

Re:Formatting Standards?

[Rockoon]

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.