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I agree on the propriety of data for a limited time. I worked in the field of Radio Astronomy, and it was common to have a two year period where the data was pr
by ajford 10y ago
I agree on the propriety of data for a limited time. I worked in the field of Radio Astronomy, and it was common to have a two year period where the data was private to the Primary Investigator (and co-investigators/consortium). I think this is a relatively acceptable approach, given how long it can take to process and fact-check data and papers.
I'm also for the publishing and tracking of code, as in many fields the data is becoming so vast that it's impossible to process or handle manually, and many pipelines and large scale systems are being built to handle this data. This inevitably means that a simple bug in code (or false/incorrect assumption by the author) can result in many lost hours and years of work.
But publishing code can also lead to biases, if there is an unintentional bias in released code or approaches that become popular within a given field.
In the field I worked in, there were two very common pipelines used by a huge majority of researchers, and I always wondered if there might be some unintentional selection effect being introduced. Well, it turns out someone else thought so too, so there's now an effort to rewrite one of these tools from the ground up without using any of the original code. It's only something like 60% complete right now, but hopefully soon it will be complete and we'll get to see if results compare, or if we spot any unintentional effects.