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by punchingwater 2788 days ago
the article states:

> “But Reitze counters that the complete data from that first run is already available online. According to Shoemaker, this includes the relevant time series data and the programs used, but "it's not a trivial matter to use them." Caltech even held a training workshop on how to deal with gravitational-wave data. That's a pretty far cry from asking the physics community to take its analysis on faith...”

Are you refuting this statement? To me, it looks like the data/analysis are open, but not yet independently verified due to difficult nature of problem space.
2 comments
smueller1234 2788 days ago
I used to work in particle/astrophysics. By and large people weren't opposed to sharing their data and software. The degree of specific expertise it took to get results was staggerng though. It takes significant technical infrastructure and expertise to even just rerun an analysis on a big corpus of data. At that stage, you haven't even validated squat, just pushed some buttons to run other people's logic. Doing this properly takes person years of effort with little to no reward.

In practice, there's usually at least two big experiments (not necessarily quite of the same generation) that were built by different groups which corroborate results. This is currently the best defense against big mistakes.

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splittingTimes 2788 days ago
I did not read the article till the very last paragraph. My bad. Of course, I do not refute it. So in this particular case they went open source.

However, from my experience in years of publishing to and reviewing for several APS journals, I stand by my statement. Because of 'publish or perish' nobody wants to give up any 'competitive edge' of their particular research. So there is no incentive system in place to foster an open source everything attitude.

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maxnoe 2787 days ago
This is changing. Slowly, as it seems to be mostly a generational issue.

The younger scientists, current PhD generation and a little up are all fed up with closed source/private data as there are no enough bright examples how good open source/data can work out.

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