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 NSF has recently taken more of an interest in research data management. They're definitely starting to make it a requirement of grant funding that the research data be digitally stored, backed up, and, after a cooling-off period to allow the principal researchers to publish, made available to the public. I'm working on a research data management group at my university, and the researchers generally seem open to the idea, though they're loathe to put in any extra effort to make it work.
I don't know. The USA (and a lot of other countries) might not be too happy since it means releasing the UK is saying it's OK for these scientists to release the USA's proprietary data. So I guess, you're right in that those jerks like the USA (and a lot of other countries) that wanted to profit from this data will get their comeuppance, but I wonder if we now need to increase taxes in order to pay for these services that used to make a profit. So that means that we all need to pay more money because of this.
I also wonder what it means for the university to release data that is illegal for them to release. I mean, on one side the court says they need to release it, but on the other side other courts say it's illegal to release it. Should be interesting in the UK for a while.
If a lab has been spending my tax money for 10 years, I want my employees to give me my data right Goddamn now.
The "reward" for doing publicly funded research is that you keep getting funded. I don't care one whit what you think you're entitled to: if you're taking my money, you work for me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
That is not hard to achieve: someone has to make an FoI request, the cost to prepare the data has to be estimated, someone has to get hired to collect and format the data and then the data is released. That can take a considerable amount of time.....but that's not the only issue. In my field of particle physics raw data is generally useless unless you understand how it was collected and how to analyse it.
Even assuming that you had several petabytes of disk/tape available to store it, raw data from ATLAS would be completely useless to you unless you really understand the detector "warts and all". Trying to understand this data without access to the detector itself and the ability to test and cross-check ideas looking at (and sometimes carefully tweaking) the hardware is literally impossible....and that is before you get into the thorny international issues about who did what and so whether it falls under any one country's laws.
These issues were discussed on a previous experiment I worked on in the US and the conclusion was that it did not serve the public to have data released in just about any form: the raw data was useless and even the processed data still had considerable "quirks" which required understanding (e.g. acceptance drops at detector boundaries etc.). This was aptly demonstrated by a pilot project which resulted in no interest at all from the public but which worryingly attracted a few nutters who were more interested in proving their pet theory than in doing science.
So while I am very sympathetic to the "the public paid for it the public should be able to access it" argument I do not think that the public's interest is best served by releasing raw data in all (most?) cases. The best way to serve the public interest is to ensure that results and ideas arising from that research are freely available to all and allow the public to build on that.
"This hubbub all came about because of the difficulty in prying the source data out of the hands of the guy who produced the "hockey stick" figures. It's covered in the book "Broken Consensus" I think it's called. The "hockey stick" is not the "source data", the source data is all of the individual readings from all the instruments, prior to corrections for sampling errors or known issues. One cannot verify the quality of the "hockey stick" result without having the source data and being able to verify the processing steps that were done to it."
I threw away some mod points because it irks me how unskeptical the garden variety climate skeptic actually is when it comes to accepting the hockey stick has been discredited. Here are a few points you should consider with your skeptics hat on...
1. Mann's original hockey stick was published in the jounal Nature, they are not well known for publishing shoddy work.
2. A senate inquisition was held on Mann's paper in which the National Acedemies of science were called in to give expert testimony on the veracity of Mann's paper. As you will no doubt learn when reading the testimony the NAS came down firmly in favour of Mann although they did highlight some minor technical problems.
3. Given that the NAS were able to agree with Mann's conclusions under oath at a hostile inquisition, how did they do so without access to the data?
4. The journal science is also not well known for publishing shoddy work. So why did NAS then publish a follow up study by Mann in their journal Science if they were not satisfied he had no only addressed the minor technical problems in the original but also greatly increaed the robustness of the findings?
5. Why can't I find a listing for a book called "broken consensus" which you cite as a source? Shouldn't you at least adhere to your own standards of evidence?
6. How do you explain the links to the data and methods found in an article called Dummies guide to the hockey stick on Mann's website?
7. Why do people belive that some difficult to obtain data (ie: time consuming) from a few nations means that the other 99.99999% of the raw data available on the web is insuffitient to recreate the hockey stick?
8. Why is McIntrye only interested in "auditing" climate science that disagrees with his opinion? Could this be because his own paper did not stand up to the traditional auditing method called "the test of time"?
If the above points do not at least cause you to question your sources then I can only conclude your sketics hat must have slipped down over your eyes...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But you haven't given a reason why it's actually bad
It wastes scientists' time that would be better spent analysing the data rather than releasing it, it wastes money collecting and disseminating the data, it pollutes the real scientific results with those of nutters trying to prove their pet theory and, in the case of commercially useful data, it risks having companies use the data to develop something commercially useful that will then be locked away behind patents and the public will be charged through the nose for.
There is also the more subjective, human issue that if you don't let people who have worked like crazy to get the data have at least the first shot at analysis then recruiting scientists is going to become extremely hard and motivating them to perform large-scale experiments will be even harder if they just have to give the data away - why would you bother if you can just sit around and get the data as soon as it is collected?
Is that bad enough? There are ways you could mitigate some of the above but the bottom line is that nothing is free: it will cost more money to make the data publically available and, as a taxpayer myself, I see no real benefit from doing it and some serious potential pitfalls.