I see ... the administration wants to get their AGWalarmism propaganda to you even faster.NASA’s Plan to Make JWST Data Immediately Available Will Hurt Astronomy
By releasing astronomers’ data before they’ve had a chance to analyze the information, NASA will make research less fair and equitable, please
In August the White House announced that the results of all federally funded research should be freely accessible by the end of 2025. This will be a big change for scientists in many fields but ultimately a good move for the democratization of research.
Under this new guidance, many peer-reviewed papers would be free for the world to read immediately upon publication rather than stuck behind expensive paywalls, and the data that underlay these papers would be fully available and properly archived for anyone who wanted to analyze them.
Very little of value is coming out of these programs, but I can see how the astronomers spending the time to perform the observations might be harmed. Overall I'm just a little surprised that the White House would order this since so much of their data (on Covid, Climate Change, etc) has and is being withheld by the mainstream in order to further their agendas. So this might completely wreck that effort.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.
So ... I went and looked at the Memorandum from the White House to see what it says.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u ... s-Memo.pdf
And found what I expected ...
Notice the word "equitable"? That's what this is about ... being woke. And in an irony they apparently can't see, they use their Covid-19 efforts as an example of the benefits of this now approach. They say ...2. Learning from the Lessons of COVID-19
When federally funded research is available to the public, it can improve lives, provide policymakers with important evidence with which to make critical decisions, accelerate the rates of discovery and translation, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society.
But that's a LIE! Contrary to what's claimed, the government has withheld much of the data on Covid effects. As proof ...Americans were offered a window into the great benefits of immediate public access to federally funded research at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of the public health crisis, government, industry, and scientists voluntarily worked together to adopt an immediate public access policy, which yielded powerful results: research and data flowed effectively, new accessible insights super-charged the rate of discovery, and translation of science soared.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editi ... d-explore/ "Here’s COVID-19 data the government has withheld and local journalists should explore"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/heal ... -data.html "The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects"
https://nypost.com/2022/02/22/cdc-withh ... pretation/ "CDC withholding COVID data over fears of misinterpretation"
"CDC has been withholding Covid-19 data from the public."
It taken repeated FOIA requests to free up some of it but still much of it is deliberately being hidden from the public and potential researchers.
So ... this may or may not be a good idea but I suggest we question the motives of those making this decision.
Because here's the kicker in the memorandum ...
That's the thing. Fewer and fewer people are trusting federally funded science ... for good reason. And rather than fix the problem, they've decided to get the propaganda generated by that science to the public faster. That's my suspicion, at least.Federal agencies should take actions to ensure that these elements of scientific and research integrity are in place in order to strengthen public trust in federally funded science.
