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NASA’s Plan to Make JWST Data Immediately Available Will Hurt Astronomy
- aurizon 4y agoYes, it will encourage data scavengers to grab a bit and say 'mine'. Working the cultivation versus hunter/gatherer analogy further - who will end up with the largest crop?? This is normally handled by the data mappers have a time to explore data tranches - after which that tranche is released. Since these are often huge data sets, a process of sequential tranche release - perhaps linked to acquisition time - should be set up. That way the farmer has a chance to assess his crop before the hunter-gatherers burrow into it.
- mindcrime 4y agoAstronomers could, for example, demand that any paper citing a result also cite the proposal that generated the enabling data. In this way, the proposal team could still accrue credit for its work, even if it wasn’t the first to publish. Of all the ideas mentioned in the article, this sounds the most reasonable to me at first blush. IANAA though, so it's hard to get a sense of how big a deal it is to propose an observation. I would think the details of the proposal would matter a lot, no? That is, some observations are probably ones that more or less everybody sees as desirable, and there wouldn't be much "credit" to be earned from proposing those? I'd also be curious to know more about the extent to which it is likely that analyzing a particular bit of data is only likely to lead to one particular conclusion (that being whatever the proposing team had in mind). That versus the likelihood of, say, Team A proposing the observation to look for X, and then Team B coming and and finding Q (which has little or nothing to do with X). Any astronomers in the crowd here feel like chiming in?