Congratulations to the winners of the International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences!

Last month at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, the above award was given to the Nimbus Data Rescue Project of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, an organization at the University of Colorado, Boulder, funded by NOAA, NASA, and NSF.  According to Showstack (2014), the Nimbus project is "recovering, reprocessing, and digitizing infrared and visible data from the NASA-funded Nimbus 1, 2, and 3 weather satellites, the first of which launched in 1964.  None of the early Nimbus data had been available for 4 decades because of archaic data formats and difficulty in accessing film rolls."  Three runners up for the prize were also chosen: you can read more about them here as well as in Showstack (2014).

The award is sponsored by the Integrated Earth Data Applications group at Columbia University, and Elsevier, who has a business interest in data stewardship services. Elsevier might be considered a controversial player, as many researchers are unhappy with their allegedly predatory journal pricing policies. Nonetheless, we should praise them when they do something right, an this appears to be a rare example.

I've written previously about data stewardship issues here and here. I am pleased that the scientific community is giving more and more attention to such issues, as exemplified by this new award program. I hope that it continues and that similar awards emerge for other sciences.  I am also more than relieved to begin a new year of blogging with some positive news.

Reference

Randy Showstack, 2014: Award program recognizes efforts to protect geoscience data. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 95 (1): 2.

Data management plan to be included in open access mandate

This month's APS News has a front-page report by Michael Lucibella, “Open Access Mandate will Include Raw Data.” The story focuses on the forthcoming mandate from the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), regarding open access to journal papers derived from federally funded research, one year after publication. Lucibella says that although no official statement has been made, it is expected that the mandate would include a data management plan, to make data sets generated by public funds available to the public as well. The story quotes the OSTP memo stating that “scientific data resulting from unclassified research supported wholly or in part by Federal funding should be stored and publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze.” Specifics are “just starting to take shape.” The story goes on to outline various challenges to such a mandate.

One valuable feature of the mandate is that “Data points that have been expunged from the final analysis will likely have to be included, the idea being that scientists can evaluate why those points were eliminated.” In principle this is a good thing, but it will be nearly impossible to enforce. Also, there may be some subjectivity involved, as data that are clearly from documented technical errors should probably not be included (in my view); transcription errors should be corrected before posting. Also, I would like meta data to be included along with the raw data files.

The story states that computer codes would not be included in the mandate, “though talks are continuing over this point.” The story quotes statistician Victoria Stodden, who expresses concern about the omission of computer codes, which will obstruct reproducible research. I share Stodden's concern and I hope the mandate will include computer codes.

Modulo the concern about computer programs, DTLR endorses both the mandate to make journal articles public after one year, as well as the mandate to make the data publicly available.  I was a co-author on two publications where we provided supplemental information that included data sets and computer scripts.  However, I've co-authored nearly 20 refereed papers in total, and obviously most of them did not include such supplemental information.  As a result, all these years later, it is impossible for me to reproduce any of that work.  (Caveat:  some of this research was not financed by public funds; nonetheless I believe the principle should apply to all published research.)  I wish such a mandate had been in place at the beginning of my career, so that all of my published work could be reproducible.  With job changes and so on, I've long lost track of data sets and computer codes that were employed in doing the work reported in those papers.

Reference

Here is the link to the full issue (PDF):  http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201311/upload/November-2013.pdf

Data stewardship

In last week's issue of Eos, Karen Simmons (2013) writes about data stewardship and her experience of attempting to recover and migrate data from long completed NASA space probe missions from the 1970s and 1980s.  Some of the data (on 7-track tapes and punch cards) was about to be discarded, as the storage facility was being shut down.  Much of the valuable metadata required to interpret the raw data is buried in mission documents that may be lost as personnel retire, change jobs, or even change offices.  The article is well worth reading and, though she doesn't mention it, the issues she raises are closely related to reproducible research.  Although the difficulties described are particularly extreme (the casual discarding of data from expensive, taxpayer-funded space probes, each unique in their own way, but long decommissioned), any of us doing experimental or observational science has much to learn from her experience.  Sadly, she finds that "usable science data and metadata from the early days of planetary exploration are now missing from the archives."  Don't let this happen to you!

Reference

K.E. Simmons, 2013:  Lost Science:  Protecting Data Through Improved Archiving.  Eos, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 94 (37):  323-324.