anna v (23:24:35) “[...] in the climate discipline, and in all disciplines where experiments cannot be carried out [...]“

^This is an *important* message that needs to get out more. The public is becoming very suspicious of climate science – and some members of the public (perhaps many) may perceive the problem as being science *more generally*. Not everyone (and perhaps only select few) will instinctively pause to contrast scientific *detective work* with scientific *experiments.

If someone wants to publish without releasing the supporting material, call it opinion or advertising but not science. If someone wants to spend a lot of public or private money to conduct an experiment and publish something without releasing enough information for others to confirm the paper, they can publish in many ways but scientific journals should not present it as being part of the scientific process. Merck can advertise pharmaceuticals in many ways, and there is no need for unsupported stuff to be presented as science in legitimate journals.

You realize that this is not the way traditional science has been handling the issue, but a new way coming out of this climate mess?

For example, when Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869 found out the periodic table he did not release the laboratory notes. He gave the thoughts and and deductions from measurements that led to the thoughts.

The methods had to be clearly outlined so the experiments could be repeated by independent researchers. Only then were the observations verified, all through the incredible burgeoning of science up to this debacle with climate.

To come out with statements as: “if someone wants to publish without releasing the supporting material, call it opinion or advertising but not science.” shows ignorance of the methodology and history of science.

I would agree though that in the climate discipline, and in all disciplines where experiments cannot be carried out, where only one set of data can exist, that data has to be open to all researchers.

AnonyMoose (07:02:08) “If someone wants to publish without releasing the supporting material, call it opinion or advertising but not science.”

Interesting – there is this dilemma of whether to trust coyness, which may be sensibly (but not necessarily explicitly) justified. Eerie & ominous – & interesting – maybe sensible… (we are left to wonder…)

Certainly not a scenario for drawing solid conclusions.

If on the other hand, research has been funded, even if in part, from tax free donations, and/or government or public sources, all data should be publicly available and the research report free to the public, not in a pay-per-view format.

I would imagine this would create a much better climate of open discussion than what we have now.

Your patient efforts towards interdisciplinary understanding are much appreciated – thank you.

ALEPH DELPHI L3 OPAL , http://greybook.cern.ch/

In order to solve the integrity of the data and conclusions problem, i.e. if the output of the hard work of the particular ant hive is correct data, the “world” community has gone for replication of experiments, i.e. new data gathering. That is why there exist numerous accelerator centers the world round. Because data may be compromised not only intentionally, but unintentionally by unfor seen experimental error. Even within CERN there were three large experiments for LEP gathering the same information, and there are now two large ones for the LHC, to hedge for the unforseen.

That is, the high energy community requires replication of results, not open data, possibly because they trust the integrity of the researchers but not their infallibility or performance of the apparatuses. New independent experiments.

Actually this is the norm in physics. Cold fusion was refuted by new experiments, not by digging into the old data.

It is only in disciplines where experiments cannot be performed that a problem arises.

In the climate science this would be what Anthony with the surface program is doing, gathering the data from the source once more, since one cannot have many earths to repeat the weather/climate.

http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2009/05/merck_creates_fake_academic_medical_journal.html

“The Scientist has reported that, yes, it’s true, Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.

“What’s wrong with this is so obvious it doesn’t have to be argued for. What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, ‘As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….’ Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!”

It offers in the comments the following:

That these “physician” researchers haven’t founded a journal paper archive like arXiv.org is telling.

arXiv is all about presenting results directly to other researchers, typically at least a year before journal publication, if not more. It’s mathematicians, physics experts and other technical ephemera there. And pure honesty.

Maybe this is one of the ways to be emphasized, no paper published unless on the arxiv for a year.

fred (17:25:57) :

To Anna V. 9:47:49

We all sweat. It ain’t your data unless you paid for it.

Now on “who pays for the research”. The donors for research in the years before the big government intrusion were that: patrons and donors of the universities. They did not claim the data as theirs, just an acknowledgement from the universities to which they donated. Actually the research coming out was a by product of the education mill. Professors were payed to be educators, which they efficiently fulfilled. Experiments were a by product at the time, and nobody claimed the results were not in the possession of the researcher. Later universities acquired patent rights if any.

Is the suggestion that the government/collective-public has now become the ultimate feudal lord with rights over thoughts and actions? Droit du segnieur?

DaveE (17:26:31) :

The scientists involved have a head start in analysis of data, their 200 papers would be unlikely to have been impeded unless either their analyses were faulty or their work too slow.

We are talking of the subculture of high energy physics, and I do not know whether this can be generalized, though I suspect so. One has to enter into the sociology of why one becomes a high energy specialist in physics. What follows is my opinion.
Scientists are drawn to particle physics because of the challenge of the “Theory of Everything”, the holy grail. That means that a high proportion are theoretically inclined, equations lagrangians and such. But the hands on experiments require a great number of able and intelligent and highly motivated scientists putting on the back burner their desire for the theory of everything for a postdoc and the possibility of getting the data. This works on the ant hive principle incredibly well, as long as the end motivation is high. If it comes about that because of freedom for data for all, the smart Aleck graduate student who went full for theory can get his hands on the data as soon or even faster in this computer age as the hard working ant, the whole field will collapse. No ants will be found, as simple as that.

All ready there is the problem in the community of the huge authorship and who does really what . In the Higgs discovery(or not) paper there will be over 2000 authors. If not all, certainly half of them could have written it by themselves alone, i.e. could analyze the data and get the correct results, and actually many do. They all have worked for their data.
If the incentive of cornering the data produced is removed, the whole thing will collapse.

http://books.google.com/books?id=W3oVRK4I7UsC&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=She+bible&source=bl&ots=uTV0iCmtdW&sig=iW4bc9G88cJyoqgb3VDgwvYFayY&hl=en&ei=9t8ASqjcIoq7mQe-yuWsCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA93,M1

Knock yourselves out.

Thank you for sharing your experience – much appreciated.

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anna v: “[...] about 200 people spent ten years of their life building the apparatus and software, and another ten years taking data with this apparatus [...]”

“The whole reason of putting in all that hard work is so as to get hands first on the data. Otherwise why bother?”
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Perhaps a very substantial amount of funding should be linked to (such) data collection, since data collection is clearly of fundamental importance in research – and in the (high) interest of the sustainable defense of civilization, we should find some financially fair way to share data so that more minds can be on problems that concern us all (without incurring costly delays).

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anna v: “[...]“it is not easy to use the data unless you have worked with the experimental apparatus for a while” [...] “what kind of knowledge”.”
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I can attest to the veracity and fundamental importance of statements of this nature. I spent a number of years engaged in a variety of ecological field work and related analyses. In some ecological field work, data collection rarely goes ‘by-the-book’. At times the norm is a lot more log notes than data (i.e. very detailed notes about quality, uncertainties, etc.) and I can assure you that the sampling is not always representative. A person assuming the cleaned-data later-analyzed is 100% accurate could not possibly draw sensible conclusions – at least not without making heavy, emphatic, appropriate use of qualifiers &/or blanket statements.

Still, my preference is that (just about) everything make it through to the literature, including negative results, so that I can see what hard-working people tried and make my own judgements about any value &/or truth in their work.

The problem remains that we don’t have enough workers on the job. People want the research done right, but a lot of people don’t want to pay what it takes to do it right. As a result, sketchiness creeps into the system via survival instinct.

There are no simple solutions, but I agree that diversity is a key to survival. A central nervous system & vital organs clearly play a critical role, but overly-centralized systems get a body into serious mobility problems. The health of the whole body is the way to avoid an undermined future as we move towards a knowledge society. Bet-hedging looks as sensible as ever.

Lack of data-access is a limiting factor in the sustainable defense of civilization.

Data should be published as soon as possible – raw, with unedited log notes.
(Any ‘adjustments’ can be published later.)

Those who collect valuable data should be commensurately compensated.

We need more competition to promote efficient knowledge-gathering. In the absence of scarce research resources, we can avert some of the sketchiness & protectionism. If we are going to sustainably defend civilization, we are going to need to increase research resources by orders of magnitude – in part to quell the crippling in-fighting in the presently-starved research system.

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anna v (22:09:20) “Unfortunately, my observation is that our society has come to define more and more money as the most desirable objective that matters in the planning of a life.”
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It is not sustainable.

Our civilization would be at very serious risk (down the road) were it not for the important corrective actions currently underway.

It is encouraging to see the focus rising above sleazy short-sightedness.

Now if we could just get the politicians to have a clue about climate ….

However, if the public paid for the generation of that data, the data belongs to the public, at least the specific data used to generate the final research study paid for by the grant.

If a researcher doesn’t like that arrangement, let him find private funds for his research.

It is the love of money that is the root of all evil.

And if anyone wants to check my family bible is the authorised version printed London 1613, in the US usually called the King James, and although a little worn and rebound by a vandal some one hundred and fifty years ago is still complete and legible although to modern eyes some of the spelling/characters are a little odd.

Unfortunately the same vandal rather did for the beautiful coloured endpapers which denote the calendar etc. It is a She bible and despite his efforts and those of other so called restorers I believe there are only some 150 complete copies of this version known to be extant today.

I prize it much.

Kindest Regards

It is also a problem if more than one paper can come from the data. In my high energy field all the data of the experiments are on huge files accessible to members of the group, but not to outsiders, since all papers ( over 200 in one case) come from the same data analyzed for different factors.

The possibility of outsiders analyzing your data at little expense to you is a problem?
More knowledge is a problem?’

anna v already answered this but I counter…

The scientists involved have a head start in analysis of data, their 200 papers would be unlikely to have been impeded unless either their analyses were faulty or their work too slow.

DaveE.

Excuse me, but was all that sweat paid work? Who paid for it?

We all sweat. It ain’t your data unless you paid for it.