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

Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[nacturation]

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

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[thepike]

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.

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[michaelwv]

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.

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[Rogerborg]

If a lab has spent a long time, let's say 10 years, accumulating some hard fought data

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.

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[NeutronCowboy]

I think you've brought up another valid point: some researchers might take the data, rehash it and publish it as their own, getting credit for it, much as you have taken my point, restated it with a minor additions, and got all the mod points for it.

I stand on the shoulder of giants. ;)

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[AJWM]

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?

Re:Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense

[TapeCutter]

"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...

Re:Peers?

[sl149q]

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.