This is an reasonable point. However, some fraction of this time will not be astronomers themselves developing new calibration techniques, but simply waiting for the pipeline folks (who do not nearly get enough credit, in my opinion) to adjust their techniques and methods to the new machine. In the meantime, in my experience, the astronomers are developing what results they can from the less-accurately calibrated data. Others could do this as well.
TRAPPIST-1 is actually an argument AGAINST proprietary periods. The raw data was publicly released right away, yet no one got scooped, no rushed and shoddy papers came out (to my knowledge), and people will still be excited to see the correctly processed and calibrated results when they come out. I think this will be the rule and not the exception, as scientists are quite capable of recognizing and being appropriately skeptical of preliminary work that took shortcuts. (The "highest Z" race was an exception, I think, as the target was the media and not the scientific community, so primacy was more important than accuracy. JWST will soon be past this point, if it's not already.)
I don't agree with this. The public benefits from this even if no member of the public ever looks at it. It boosts confidence, not because a random member of the public has any ability to analyze it, but because it shows that other experts have had a chance to analyze it and declined. As an extreme example, suppose you are giving a public talk on TRAPPIST-1 and some guy (it's almost always a guy) asserts the spectral data demonstrates the existence of aliens. If you simply and correctly state "Our analysis shows no evidence of aliens", there will still be doubts, in him and others. (Are you doing the right analysis? Are you hiding something because it's non-orthodox? Etc.) But if you can add that "the data is publicly available" then the questioner knows that the minority of experts who are pro-alien (Avi Loeb, etc.) have had a chance to look at it. They would not be shy pointing out the obvious if it existed in the data.
Some data JWST collected on the Trappist system is public and noone wrote a paper about it?
I believe that TRAPPIST or potentially habitable exoplanet papers will come very slow and will be checked quite a lot, before coming to conclusions.History of science is full of examples where stories were corrected, revised or retraced - the ALH84001 meteorite, the arsenic life and recently the phosphine story on Venus.I'd prefer to wait before jumping on conclusions.
NASA Telescope, Moon Rocket Named TIME Inventions of 2022and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket were named 2022 TIME Inventions of the Year.
NASA, as a federal agency that funds and conducts research, is onboard with the idea of freely accessible data. But it has a plan that goes much further than the White House’s and that is highly problematic. The agency currently gives a proprietary period to some scientists who use particular facilities, such as a 12-month period for the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that those scientists can gather and analyze data carefully without fear of their work being poached. NASA is looking to end this policy in its effort to make science more open-access.Losing this exclusivity would be really bad for astronomy and planetary science. Without a proprietary period, an astronomer with a brilliant insight might spend years developing it, months crafting a successful proposal to execute it, and precious hours of highly competitive JWST time to actually perform the observations—only to have someone else scoop up the data from a public archive and publish the result. This is a reasonable concern—such scooping has happened before.
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”
Quote from: matthewkantar on 12/05/2022 10:23 pmWould be more believable with examples of “scooping.”Are you trolling? How can someone have "scooped" a jwst find when the data has a proprietary period. Thats literally how "scooping" is prevented.
Quote from: matthewkantar on 12/05/2022 10:23 pmWould be more believable with examples of “scooping.”If you want some real examples there was the discovery of water in the atmosphere of K2-18b, where the team who originally got the data found out that a UCL team were publishing their data in Nature Astronomy. The first team then dumped their preliminary work to the arXiv.
In my field there was the case of the Sunburst Arc, an extraordinary lensed galaxy leaking ionising photons. The discovery team were forced to publish early because another researcher had published an incredibly rushed paper just 2 days after their data became public. [...] The lead author who got scooped was a PhD student.
That incident is a great example of how these races degrade the quality of science, a half-assed analysis was published without peer review and the original authors immediately published their draft in response instead of waiting for review.
I think science was actually advanced in this case. Tell me honestly, what do you remember from the final paper that was not in the quick version? I think I can speak for most scientists and say "Hey, they found water in the atmosphere of a nearby planet!". And this knowledge was obtained months before the paper would have come out on its own, had the original group had their way.
If the lead author in 2018 was T. Emil Rivera-Thorsen, they were not a PhD student, but a post-doc.If I've got the right articles for these examples, this shows exactly what happens when you ask for examples. Nobody really got "scooped", instead they had to publish earlier than they would have preferred. It's not really a hapless grad student that got their thesis crushed, but a early stage researcher that was pushed to publish early. There are no examples I know of in astronomy where the rushed analysis was wrong and needed to be retracted. (This did happen with COVID pre-prints, though the incentive there was to increase the pace of science more than to beat competitors.)
It's not at all obvious that peer review contributes more to science than it hurts by delaying distribution of knowledge. Here's a major journal that is giving up on it entirely, replacing it with public comment on a initially published article.