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UK University Researchers Must Make Data Available

Posted by timothy on from the time-to-pay-the-public-piper dept.

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.

7 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by nacturation · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.

    --
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    1. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      some meteorologist will think that running a data set through an excel curve fitting algorithm is science.

      Nope -- it's only science if you adjust and filter the data first to make it match your truth. Resist releasing your data though, others may adjust and filter it other ways to make it match their truth. All science in the world of research driven by political agendas and egotistical arrogance.

      Disclose, when in doubt disclose more. Anything less in scientific arenas where others can't repeat your experiments is just a symptom of fear, insecurity, and lack of confidence that your conclusions will stand up to the view and study of many brains (some better than yours, some worse).

      Same argument for why FOSS is better - many eyes reviewing (in theory) and rapid fixes.

    2. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by thepike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I totally agree. If people just start looking at each others data instead of verifying it, a lot of mistakes (or fraudulent data) will never be caught.

      Also, I have to wonder what the timeline for releasing data is. My research is funded with government money (NIH and NSF) but it can take years to get enough data to make a worthwhile paper. If I have to release my data before then it will hurt my ability to publish papers without getting scooped. You could end up with a whole closet industry of people just data mining the data others have had to disclose. And, here's the main catch, if you don't have to release results you haven't yet reported on, the problem isn't solved at all because I could just choose to "not yet publish" any results that don't agree with what I want to say. Nothing says I ever have to publish results I get, so why wouldn't I just sit on them?

      Not that sitting on data just because it doesn't agree is a good thing, but it happens. And plenty of good data goes unpublished (experiments fail, uninteresting results happen, journals don't publish negative results very often etc) so what about that data? Overall this law isn't going to help anything, and will just cause issues.

    3. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by michaelwv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Absolutely. The public should have access to the data. Public grants then also need to pay for curating the data. Libraries aren't free, archives aren't free, package data in an actually useful form takes precious time, which is scientists most precious resource. Having data in a form that is useful to the 25 people in your research group is very different than providing data that can be used by thousands of people. It's analogous to the difference between the quick bash script you have that backs up your movies to your external hard drive, and having something that you're willing to distribute to 1000 people and provide support.

    4. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by HungryHobo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      not really.
      Your problems with these possible situations are based on the deeply flawed system we have in place now.

      Give academics the respect and credit they deserve for collecting vast quantities of high quality data rather than merely for the 2 page paper they write about some interesting statistical anomalies they found in said data and this ceases to be a problem.

      The way papers are written, reviewed and published today and the way academics are given credit is based on a system hundreds of years old when it costly to print hundreds of pages of boring figures.

      Now data is cheap beyond words. Publishing a few hundred words or a gigabyte is little different when your audience is fairly small and the way academics publish should reflect that but it's too hidebound and dogmatic to do that.

      A professor who does nothing but produce a high quality and hard to acquire dataset deserves credit even if he comes to no conclusions at all.

      The problem is with the system and with the way academics think.
      Not with this possible change.

      Fix your system.

    5. Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense by AJWM · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Examining old data has one value and one value alone - verifying that the claim made for the data matches up with the data. [...] Access to raw data for any other reason is pointless.

      Hardly. One could analyse the raw data looking for something other than what the original researchers were looking for. There might even be some interesting signal buried in the data that original team, focusing on something else, disregarded as noise. Minute timing errors in, say, solar wind data returned from a spacecraft might turn up some oddity of orbital mechanics, for example. The researcher focusing on the sensor data rather than the timestamps will miss it, but it's all part of the raw data. How many biologists discarded moldy Petri dishes as ruined, without recording that, before Fleming thought to investigate why bacteria didn't grow near the mold?

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      -- Alastair
  2. Re:Peers? by sl149q · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.