Towards an open (data) science culture

Last week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of ATLAS computing at Chilton where RAL is located. (The anniversary was actually earlier, we just celebrated it now.)

While much of the event was about the computing and had lots of really interesting talks (which should appear on the Chilton site), let's highlight a data talk by Professor Jeremy Frey. If you remember the faster than light neutrinos, Jeremy praised CERN for making the data available early, even with caveats and doubts about the preliminary results.  The idea is to get your data out, so it people can have a look at it and comment. Even if the preliminary results are wrong and neutrinos are not faster than light, what matters is that the data comes out and people can look at it. And most importantly, that it will not negatively impact people's careers for publishing it.On the contrary, Jeremy is absolutely right to point out that it should be good for people's careers to make data available (with suitable caveats).

But what would an "open science" data model look like?  Suddenly you would get a lot more data flying around, instead of (or in addition to) preprints and random emails and word of mouth. Perhaps it will work a bit like open source, which is supposed to be "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow."  With open source, you sometimes see code which isn't quite ready for production, but at least you can look at the code and figure out whether it will work, and maybe adapt it.

While we are on the subject of open stuff, the code that simulates science and analyses data is also important. Please consider signing the SSI petition.

Public research, open data

RAL hosted a meeting for research councils, other public bodies, and industry participants, on open data, organised with the Big Innovation Centre (we will have a link once the presentations have been uploaded).

As you know, research councils in the UK have data policies which say

• Publicly funded data must be made public
• Data can be embargoed - even if publicly funded, it will be protected for a period of time, to enable you to get your results, write your papers, achieve world domination. You know, usual stuff.
• Data should be usable.
• The people who produced the data should be credited for the work - in other words, the data should be cited, as you would cite a publication with results that you use or refer to.

All of these are quite challenging (of this more anon), but interestingly some of the other data publishers had to even train (external) people to use their data. Would you say data is open not just when it is usable, but also actually being used? Certainly makes the policies even more challenging. The next step beyond that would be that the data actually has a measurable economic impact.

You might ask: so what use is the high energy physics (HEP) data, older data, or LHC data such as that held by GridPP, to the general public?  But that is the wrong question, because you don't know what use it is till someone's got it and looked at it. If we can't see an application of the data today - someone else might see it, or we might see one tomorrow.  And the applications of HEP tend to come after some time: when neutrons were discovered, no one knew what they were good for; today they are used in almost all areas of science. Accelerators used in the early days of physics have led to the ones we use today in physics, but also to the ones used in healthcare. What good will come of the LHC data?  Who knows. HEP has the potential to have a huge impact - if you're patient...