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.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
no, peer review is good. It helps to point out mistakes or inconsistencies. Getting rid of scientific journals is quasi-good (less profit motive in science, but also less chance to get work out there).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
"Scientists" scared of goofy analysis are priests, not scientists. Take their funding away and use their PhD parchment for toilet paper.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
On the other hand, this will likely produce a whole stream of deliberately inaccurate analyses with ulterior motives behind them.
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
There is no reason why this kind of data should ever be "secret"
Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to be made publicly available.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Appendices with raw data are often included already in the online editions of journals. Of course, if the ruling applies to all data generated in the course of a study, whether it is used in publications or not, it could be onerous indeed.
That doesn't matter. The important thing is that the attacks are made. Even if every one is shown to be completely wrong, people will still remember all those (erroneous) anti-global warming reports. Especially since the media will enthusiastically report the initial attack and relegate the news of its rebuttal to a small paragraph on page 34, if they report it at all.
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
Not sure what regulations are on "release all data to the public" but seems like there are loopholes big enough to drive a bus through. For instance, in my field, no one but me knows how many cells I looked at. Maybe that thing I said happens in these cells happens in all those cells. Maybe I looked at 300 before seeing one doing what I said, took a picture of that one, and that was that. All my data would be that one cell I cherrypicked.
Even if I did take pictures of all 300, no one knows but me. Those other 299 can dissapear.
If I'm -not- evil though, this could hurt me. If I looked at say 3000 cells, and 10 were doing a thing that I thought was significant, I could have my reasons. Maybe the other 2990 were the wrong cell type or something. Being the expert, that might be obvious to me just from looking at them. A non expert looking at them might not see that. They would just see that out of 3000 cells, I chose the 10 that supported my data. They might call foul without bothering to have me explain myself.
There's no reason the data should be secret, but most data doesn't stand on it's own, and writing up supporting information to -all data gathered- just isn't going to happen.
errr... no always.
Putting data into peoples hands whoa aren't experts often leads to bad things. See every non expert who believed Wakefield study because they didn't understand how to interpret data. In that case kids died , and kids are still dying.
In principle I agree with you, but we live in an are where everyone thinks they are a qualified expert in anything. That simply isn't true, and no good will come out of this.
The data wan't show a flaw in the study because it wasn't used, but he will inevitably cherry pick data to 'prove' the study is wrong. And people like Hannah Devlin are always happy to publish claims without proper study. So no good can come from this, and people need to understand that.
It's hard problem to solve.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If people cannot replicate your results it isn't science.
And with Climate Science part of the process is showing how you collected and interpreted the data. If you are not willing to share the raw data so other researchers can attempt to replicate your methods and results then don't bother publishing.
MOD PARENT UP!!
The problem that the climate scientists have created for themselves is that they are hiding the data from everyone. Up until a few months ago, these requests were relatively rare. Some of the requesting parties actually have fairly strong credentials. Steve McIntyre may be hated by the folk at realclimate, but he is an IPCC reviewer. To stonewall him is a little different than refusing to provide it to Jenny McCarthy.
As opposed to the proselytizers who are funded by the NGO's and the new "Green" capitalists and rent-seekers.
One of the more interesting bits of the Climategate emails showed that Mann was happy to share his data EXCEPT to people who he thought would disagree with his methods and results.
And in this case Mann was also the recipient of the tree ring data showing that again if you agreed with the owners ideas he had no problem getting you copies of what you needed.
Unfortunately, Climategate proved that, at least in the field of climate research, "peer review" is worthless; Mann et al were actively conspiring to ensure that only "friendly" eyes carried out the reviews; anyone thought to be showing signs of scepticism were blacklisted, whether individuals or publications.
To add to that, Glaciergate proved that much of what was claimed to be peer-reviewed was actually just regurgitated propaganda, often based on anecdotal evidence (reminisces of mountaineers published in a student rag? Puh-lease!)
So, appeals to authority ("oh but all this research has been peer reviewed") just don't hold any more. Not until all the data and all the methods used to arrive at the results are made available, and the results can be independently confirmed or denied, can we say whether the research was worth the weight of mouldy notebooks it was archived on.
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Simply generating massive amounts of data isn't considered science - figuring out what it means is. I say this as someone who is very good at generating data quickly, but not particularly good at interpreting it.
Spot on. I have a PhD in Comp. Sci. (Multi-Agent Systems / Market Based Control). One of the things you learn (maybe in you Universitity degree courses or in your first paper presentation) is that data does not mean *anything*, what matters is the interpretation of such data.
Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that programs used for the generation / manipulation of such data should also be free / scrutinable. Specially those developped during the research as they are also being paid by the tax payers money.
In the field I am working now (Agent based computational economics) a lot of people do these so called agent-based simulations, then they write a nice paper about what their simulations showed and try to publish it. The problem is that they keep their code! and in that respect they are deffinitely removing a good chunk of the "methods" part of their research. It is absolutely impossible to duplicate that work without the code.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'