An End To Sitting On Taxpayer-Funded Space Research News?

I don't think this bill would do what the Nasawatch title/question implies.

I think this is about Open Access -- i.e., that research papers published in the peer reviewed journals would be freely available on the Internet.

But that would be for the papers ... no one "sits on" anything once they get to the point of publishing it ... it is no longer "sat on" at that point.

Providing Open Access to taxpayer-funded research papers is a good idea, and many scientists have tried just doing this themselves, but they have to be careful how it is done so as to not infringe on the journal copyrights. Still other scientists specifically select Open Access journals to publish in, but most of these do not have the prestige or "stamp of quality" in the eyes of the science community.

While we all agree it is a PAIN that some journals like SCIENCE and NATURE have embargoes (look at the 2 planetary research stories this week in SCIENCE), it remains true that a paper published in these journals is more likely to be reported on to the general public than a story in any of the other journals that space scientists publish in. The newsmedia have it in their heads that if it is published in SCIENCE or NATURE, it must be good research and must have passed through a more rigorous peer review than other journals. None of which is true, and much of what these 2 "magazine" journals publish is garbage. But be that as it may.

Now, as for "An End To Sitting On Taxpayer-Funded Space Research News?" -- there still remains the issue of: do you, the taxpayer, let the scientists have the time they need to (a) collect the data, (b) analyze the data, and (c) write it up for publication? Or do you the taxpayer insist that their data go straight to the internet almost as soon as it is received, which Nasawatch has advocated for ONE of the LRO investigations (the cameras) but not the others, and for which a handful of planetary missions (MER, Phoenix) have done for their pictures (but not data from their other instruments) but major astronomy spacecraft like Hubble do not do? At issue here is whether the taxpayer paid for the data to be collected and made available immediately, or whether the taxpayer also paid for the value-added of having the folks who built and operated the instrument on the spacecraft have a little time to collect all the data they need to address a topic, calibrate those data, analyze those data, and then offer (through peer-reviewed publication) their best discussion of what they think the data from the instrument they were entrusted to build and operate might mean?

NASA, for one, pays for *investigations* not *instruments*. They expect the instrument to be built, operated (which often requires highly knowledgable scientists to figure out what data to collect and when), and for the data to be reduced, analyzed and reported on by the science teams. They also expect the data to be archived, and for some missions (e.g., Mars) they require the data to be archived within 6 months, for others (e.g., HST) they give the investigators a year of proprietary access (Mars instruments have no proprietary access but do have 6 months to validate and archive the data). NASA's policies on archiving data, proprietary access, and access to the data for the world-at-large are inconsistent across all of the space sciences and that probably needs to be changed. It should not just apply to the spacecraft and their instruments, but to the smaller grants that scientists get for conducting research. If a camera orbiting the Moon has to release the pictures right away, then so should the scientist working with some rover test out in the Atacama, or collecting meteorites down in Antarctica, or whatever. A uniform policy is needed... BUT, this is not the same as what the bill before Congress is about.

I enthusiastically support most of what LPQAM said, excluding some things of which I have no knowledge.

LPQAM was brushing against a concept that the law really should acknowledge -- a form of intellectual property (IP)rights in the experiment design and procedures, and in the analysis methods. At my company, one of the keys to future work is IP, usually in the form of know-how for building spaceborne equipment that does what our customer wants. The corresponding concept for a university astronomer is a clever idea for how to make measurements toward a particular scientific goal or how to assemble results from libraries with a unique analysis method. The insight is what brings value. Without some form of IP protection, the incentive for innovation is deflated.

The other key point is that there's already plenty of incentive not to sit on data that could yield an important result. I can think of two countervailing factors that would make you wait: (1) the information isn't solid or complete enough to publish yet; or (2) you're too busy and you prioritize it behind something else. The second factor is why a time limit is common for IP rights in data. But the first is why some of the lunar results were "in the can" for so long before this. Individually, the data sets were not publishable, but after M3, there was a complete and compelling story. Rushing the older data to press, with bold but speculative conclusions, would not have benefited the progress of science.

What about ITAR review first? Feds have been sent to prison for letting research papers fall into the wrong hands.

What I find objectionable is that certain papers are only available through online sources that exact a fee to provide a copy, and they forbid their authors from making free copies available. In many, if not most cases, these papers are reporting on publically funded research. It used to be that authors made their papers available for free all the time. I believe this move towards fee-for-access has impeded the progress of science.

Complete agreement with LPQAM. The title of this post - "An End To Sitting On Taxpayer-Funded Space Research News?" - is simple muckraking. Scientists have a strong incentive to get their results out as soon as they have confidence in them. There are many venues for publishing preprints that are publicly accessible for free on the internet, and most scientists are quick to post their work at these sites, even before their paper is accepted by a peer review journal. It is true that the professional science media require subscriptions in order to read the papers that are published, and this indeed an unfortunate handicap for people without such subscriptions or who are not associated with an institution that has one. But the preprint posting venues get around that entirely. Trying to avoid relying on such informal venues is what this bill is about.

Sitting on "news"? It only becomes news when there is a verifiable conclusion from the science community, and that's what publication and refereeing accompish.

By the way, the difference between real journalism and "news aggregation" is worth pointing out here. Some thought is expended and analysis is offered in the former, while just a teaser title is attached to some preexisting document in the latter. It looks like this posting is clearly not about journalism. Channeling Matt Drudge perhaps?

LPQAM has it exactly right that this is all about where results should be published and nothing else; but I would go further on this point. In addition to Nature and Science, none of the major journals for astronomy and astrophysics: The Astrophysical Journal, The Astronomical Journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Icarus, Proceeding of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, have open free internet access to their articles. Unless "publication" can considered to be parallel posting in sites like arXiv, which is now common practice for the great majority of all astrophysical research, this would require a profound and ill-considered shift in how results are reviewed, communicated, and curated. It would probably also destroy the major US journals cited above, given their strong dependence on sponsored research.

Oh, only if this did have anything to do with making federally-funded data publicly accessible!

NASA field centers regularly compete with Universities and industry. In doing so, they hide information pertaining to technology that they deem competitive.

That won't change.

Seems like there is a commercial idea here. Create a web portal for sharing documents. Funded, of course, by selling advertisement. Then authors, if they retain their copyrights (which, in general, the government does for government created work), can place papers and articles on the site. Maybe someone can convince google to put something together?

If the government does go through with this, I hope they provide adequate funding and, at least, put together a robust system. I LOVE ntrs.nasa.gov. What a wonderful wealth of information. However, over the last few days I haven't been able to connect to the server. I was able to connect today, but got the message "The NASA Technical Reports Server is currently unavailable as of September 24, 2009, due to unforeseen but required data maintenance. We apologize for the incovenience. NASA hopes to make this database available in approximately 1 week."

BTW, that was NASA's misspelling of inconvenience, not mine.

Just a thought but given the volume of research NASA does wouldn't it make sense for NASA to create its own series of Online Peer Review Journals for NASA researchers to publish in? As with existing journals the reviewers could come from outside of NASA to ensure quality.

Since the journals would be funded out of the NASA budget published articles could be accessible free to anyone via the web. Hard copies (which still have a status in some fields) could be distributed to university libraries around the world as part of NASA's public outreach. A series of high quality peer reviewed journals would also provide an excellent showcase of how NASA is advancing the different fields of science.

Well, I disagree with LPQAM. The cameras are scientific instruments, but they are an exception. It's one to collect data from some instruments and peer review them, but complete different to apply the same policy to cameras. Cameras are a powerful PR tool and the public admires the images.

So yes, I support Keith Cowing for his efforts to have data from cameras as soon as possible. People who live in the USA deserve to see their images as soon as possible. I'm European and I say the same things should be valid for the space research institute of my country and ESA.

But the general public even doesn't need that much. One simple image per day is enough to get all of us excited. As far as I see LROC hasn't updated the site for about six days. Before that we say a featured image on September 18th and 19th. Before that? SEPTEMBER 7TH! The MRO team does it better for HiRISE - we got several images per WEEK.

So how do you expect to impress the public with this policy?

"Just a thought but given the volume of research NASA does wouldn't it make sense for NASA to create its own series of Online Peer Review Journals for NASA researchers to publish in? As with existing journals the reviewers could come from outside of NASA to ensure quality."

The most useful journals are ones defined by discipline, not defined by funding agency. OK, let's suppose NASA starts a "space physics"journal. Do researchers funded by NSF, DOE, ESA, JAXA etc. get to publish in it? Well, of course, you'd say! So why then is NASA money being spent to do that?

True intellectual independence of a journal with regard to content is ensured by a lot more than having outside referees (and it would be crazy to ban NASA scientists from being referees in a respected scientific journal). I would be very concerned that if NASA were to manage such a journal, subtle forces would help the largest grantees.

Heywood,

Your response gets down to the key issue. What is the purpose of scientific publication? Is it the traditional one of making the results of research widely and quickly available to the research community (as well as the general public) with some quality assurance that the methodology used was appropriate? Or it is publication merely for boosting the status of the scientists submitting the article?

Also there is no reason those other agencies couldn't develop their own journals as a tool to communicate results to the public. It would fit right in the emerging paradigm of the Internet making information more accessible, versus the old paradigm of restricting the flow of information. When you look at the cost of traditional journals in science you see exactly what I mean.

"It would fit right in the emerging paradigm of the Internet making information more accessible, versus the old paradigm of restricting the flow of information."

No, it has nothing to do with that. Essentially all major journals have their papers downloadable on the web IF you or your institution have a subscription. That paradigm emerged a long time ago. The subscription charge pays for the management of the journal, and the organization of their peer review processes. A paradigm of getting those people to work for free doesn't make a lot of sense.

I never said anything about status boosting. The purpose of publication in a reputable journal is obvious. To communicate results and analysis in a manner that gives the reader some assurance of credibility. As I said, that makes some awkwardness in independence if the journal is done by an agency that has vested interest in the results. It also means that scientifically relevant papers done by different agencies don't get published in the same place, which is intellectually unproductive.

I think it would be reasonable for funding agencies to underwrite subscriptions for scientists, such that if you deserve money to do research, you deserve to be able to read about what others are doing in relevant fields. In fact, that's exactly what university overhead does. Putting money into institutional subscriptions.

I'm not particularly sanguine about free "public" access to these research papers. Scientifically, that access has really low value.

Heywood,

So you feel the public has no right to access the research its paying for through taxpayer dollars? No right to read the published papers generated from the research it funded?

If so why should the public keep funding science? Government funding of science is intended to benefit the American public, not be another entitlement program.

If the science community at large takes your attitude then its no wonder the budget for science, especially basic science, is so vulnerable to budget cuts. How are you going to get public support for funding it when you don't allow the public access to the results? And how do you propose to excite the next generation, one raised on the Internet, to be scientists if you cut them off from the most exciting discoveries?

"People who live in the USA deserve to see their images as soon as possible."

Huh? Well, I guess that goes for all federally funded scientists taking pictures, right? Wow, that's a lot of pictures!

No, people in the USA deserve to get the science they paid for, and to the extent that pretty pictures come out of it, let's make sure they get those too, when they're ready. They didn't pay for pretty pictures any more than they paid for launch pads. Hey! A few square millimeters of pad 17B belongs to ME! I paid for it! I should get access to that anytime I want. Why, I should also get face time with any astronaut I want for at least a few seconds. After all, they're working for me.

@Dr. C:

"Intellectual property (IP)rights in the experiment design and procedures, and in the analysis methods"

This is the last thing we need. If people started patenting their experiments, scientists would need a team of lawyers to get any research done. Would you need to pay a licensing fee in order to replicate someone else's experiment? This sounds like a very bad idea to me.

@ Homer Farber:

There is an issue about what government funds are actually paying for. Is it the research or the research and the data? I think the government, and by extension the public, should be paying for both. Way more data are being collected these days than any one team of scientists can analyze, so it's important to make the data as widely available as possible in order to get as much value as we can out of public monies.

I do think it is reasonable to give the original scientists some time to work with the data before getting deposited in something like the PDS. However, the importance of public outreach for securing funding cannot be overlooked. That means communicating with the public as early and as often as possible.

Speaking of public outreach, I do think that access to government services, data, facilities, etc. should by default be as open as possible. One can always make reductio ad absurdum arguments which would take public access to a ridiculously impractical level, but that doesn't invalidate the basic principle of government openness. Maybe we all can't book appointments with astronauts whenever we want, but public outreach is part of an astronaut's job, and part of that job is being available for public appearances where you could maybe get those few seconds of time in.

I for one don't see the problem with requiring any scientific paper that is published being available on the agencies website. Perhaps you might allow a reasonable period of time between journal publication and posting on the agency website. But the work the public pays for should be available to the public.

As a note the Smithsonian is full of specimens (think data base) collected on government sponsored expeditions going back a 150 years or more. The original collectors had first crack at the specimens but now they are available to any qualified researcher who makes a request to view them. Several new species have been described from those old specimens. That would be a good model for any data collected from NASA spacecraft. Perhaps a specified time after the mission ends the data would be in the public domain.