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> Meanwhile, our team received a flurry of hate mail and an onslaught of time-consuming Freedom of Information requests for access to our raw data and years of

by jkot 10y ago

> Meanwhile, our team received a flurry of hate mail and an onslaught of time-consuming Freedom of Information requests for access to our raw data and years of our emails, in search of ammunition to undermine and discredit our team and results. > The mammoth process involved three extra rounds of peer-review and four new peer-reviewers. From the original submission on 3 November, 2011, to the paper’s re-acceptance on 26 April, 2016, the manuscript was reviewed by seven reviewers and two editors, underwent nine rounds of revisions, and was assessed a total of 21 times – not to mention the countless rounds of internal revisions made by our research team and data contributors. One reviewer even commented that we had done “a commendable, perhaps bordering on an insane, amount of work”. So one side you do this "mammoth" and "insane" task to review paper. On other side you block people from doing independent audit? Climate studies decide how billions (if not trillions) of dollars are spend. People should be allowed to cross examine raw data and program source code.

lostlogin 10y ago
If its coming with hate mail and or has a generally offensive tone, I don't think it unreasonable to be unhappy. The author doesn't appear to have blocked access. One can cross examine without being a dick.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jkot 10y ago
  Read linked article, offensive language was used AFTER they refused to provide raw data. It took lawsuit to get them.
  - frankquist 10y ago
    Context was not provided however - an article that calls researchers bimbos is not one I take on its word. Was the raw data refused? And why was it refused? Perhaps because they were, as the original article states, prepping the study for publication, or because they had put it on hold? Or because they put the paper on hold and wanted to focus on doublechecking it before spending work on making the data available? Perhaps they still had to retrieve the rights to publish the data, or find a way to publish it in a good way? Context is lacking to state that there was a non-benign refusal of data.
  - dalke 10y ago
    I read the article. I saw nothing about a lawsuit. I also read that the final paper wasn't published until very recently. Why should a research group be forced to distribute raw data years before the paper is finished? In the US, for example, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm says "The term, Research Data, is defined as the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings. It does not include: preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, ... " I know nothing about the Australian equivalent.
    - jkot 10y ago
      Paper was published first time several years ago. Lawsuit is mentioned in other article.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
bertil 10y ago
My understanding is that for climate science, a lot of effort is spent to debunk claims, by well-financed groups who will publish without independent peer-review but with a clear goal in mind. Allowing those groups to access the same data means that the researchers will have to spend a lot more effort explaining why those claims are unfounded. That means the researchers are not really encouraged into sharing the data. There is a more general issue in science or any data-intensive practice (Google ranking is another example) where the argument “People should be allowed to cross examine raw data” fails to acknowledge that ‘People’ generally do not have the ability or know-how to, and those who can generally have interested financial backing. In many cases, it is positive (Open Source Map is a good example of that: my employer is interested in identifying, say, bike parking spots) but there are examples where de-anonymisation, competitive pressure, make “sharing data” a pragmatic question that needs more than principles. Will more people who can contribute positively to climate science help if they had free access to those data? It is the case for astronomy; I am less convinced for climate science.
- jkot 10y ago
  Paranoid talks about "well financed groups" have no place in science. Climate science is way more important than astronomy. It should have much higher standards for transparency, not other way around.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    Get rid of copyright law, then everyone can have the data. People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a general way (whereas within the field other researchers probably do have IP rights to use the same data).
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      > People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a general way While I agree that this is a problem in the current copyright law, there is still a way for researchers to "circumvent" this copyright restriction without violating the scientific principle of independent verifiability that I outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720: Let's say that the data is generally distributed by the owner in a standard format, say, a zip archive, which we will name foo.zip here (for simplicity). If you can't distribute the data itself, you write into your research paper a short explanation of the license terms that disallow the distribution of foo.zip. But you also add a notice what the SHA256 sum of foo.zip is. If some person who has also access to the data (say, from another university) has interest that the research result can be checked independently, they will leak foo.zip somewhere (I can imagine that sci-hub would be willing to provide server space for this). This way access for independent verifiers can be "assured" without the original researchers having to violate copyright law.
jackmott 10y ago
There has been enough raw data and code out there for an amateur to confirm that global warming is real for decades. I did it myself ~10 years ago. Here is a small subset of data and code that is public domain: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

by jkot 10y ago

lostlogin 10y ago

If its coming with hate mail and or has a generally offensive tone, I don't think it unreasonable to be unhappy. The author doesn't appear to have blocked access. One can cross examine without being a dick.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jkot 10y ago
Read linked article, offensive language was used AFTER they refused to provide raw data. It took lawsuit to get them.
- frankquist 10y ago
  Context was not provided however - an article that calls researchers bimbos is not one I take on its word. Was the raw data refused? And why was it refused? Perhaps because they were, as the original article states, prepping the study for publication, or because they had put it on hold? Or because they put the paper on hold and wanted to focus on doublechecking it before spending work on making the data available? Perhaps they still had to retrieve the rights to publish the data, or find a way to publish it in a good way? Context is lacking to state that there was a non-benign refusal of data.
- dalke 10y ago
  I read the article. I saw nothing about a lawsuit. I also read that the final paper wasn't published until very recently. Why should a research group be forced to distribute raw data years before the paper is finished? In the US, for example, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm says "The term, Research Data, is defined as the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings. It does not include: preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, ... " I know nothing about the Australian equivalent.
  - jkot 10y ago
    Paper was published first time several years ago. Lawsuit is mentioned in other article.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bertil 10y ago

My understanding is that for climate science, a lot of effort is spent to debunk claims, by well-financed groups who will publish without independent peer-review but with a clear goal in mind. Allowing those groups to access the same data means that the researchers will have to spend a lot more effort explaining why those claims are unfounded. That means the researchers are not really encouraged into sharing the data. There is a more general issue in science or any data-intensive practice (Google ranking is another example) where the argument “People should be allowed to cross examine raw data” fails to acknowledge that ‘People’ generally do not have the ability or know-how to, and those who can generally have interested financial backing. In many cases, it is positive (Open Source Map is a good example of that: my employer is interested in identifying, say, bike parking spots) but there are examples where de-anonymisation, competitive pressure, make “sharing data” a pragmatic question that needs more than principles. Will more people who can contribute positively to climate science help if they had free access to those data? It is the case for astronomy; I am less convinced for climate science.

jkot 10y ago
Paranoid talks about "well financed groups" have no place in science. Climate science is way more important than astronomy. It should have much higher standards for transparency, not other way around.
- XorNot 10y ago
  Get rid of copyright law, then everyone can have the data. People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a general way (whereas within the field other researchers probably do have IP rights to use the same data).
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > People keep ignoring the fact that you can't just release data like that all over the place, because researchers often do not have the IP rights to do so in a general way While I agree that this is a problem in the current copyright law, there is still a way for researchers to "circumvent" this copyright restriction without violating the scientific principle of independent verifiability that I outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099720: Let's say that the data is generally distributed by the owner in a standard format, say, a zip archive, which we will name foo.zip here (for simplicity). If you can't distribute the data itself, you write into your research paper a short explanation of the license terms that disallow the distribution of foo.zip. But you also add a notice what the SHA256 sum of foo.zip is. If some person who has also access to the data (say, from another university) has interest that the research result can be checked independently, they will leak foo.zip somewhere (I can imagine that sci-hub would be willing to provide server space for this). This way access for independent verifiers can be "assured" without the original researchers having to violate copyright law.

jackmott 10y ago

There has been enough raw data and code out there for an amateur to confirm that global warming is real for decades. I did it myself ~10 years ago. Here is a small subset of data and code that is public domain: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/