I can't imagine the amount of work that goes into making the data meaningful to an outsider. Although CERN is so big, maybe they need to have great documentation even for internal use.

It's totally irrelevant and shameful that data is held back for such reasons. Put a disclaimer/warning on it if need be.

When scientists play a part in the open access problem it's like having doctors who smoke cigarettes. There are plenty reasons the cancer is happening already without the leaders of a field contributing to it.

"In our field of particle physics, there isn't the tradition of making data public," says Thaler. "To actually get data publicly with no other restrictions—that's unprecedented."

The OP was right, though. Just making the data accessible and documented is a huge undertaking. It's truly a laudable effort.

From the other side, I cannot imagine using the data without intimate knowledge of the entire setup. There are very few people that can look meaningfully at such kind of data, which is why publishing the dataset (and all the work it involves) is often neglected.

Not to defend the behavior in any way, but remind yourself: in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time. For a dataset, I've seen people factor-in the effort to make it public VS the potential citations you could get out of it.

disclaimer: I work in research

Journals should not accept for publication articles which do not come with data and analysis source code for full replication of the results reported.

There are very valid reasons for embargo periods. Other than that I agree. That should be the default.

Why do you believe journals are the correct place to apply pressure?

Because in principle peer review is the basis of scientific progress. Without peer review, poor incentives lead to scientific inquiry about as accurate or useful as Buzzfeed.

Of course modern journals are a disgrace to the enlightenment. But the solution is to fix them, or if that can't be done, replace them. Not to stop the system of peer review entirely.

> in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time

Which is why it's high time publishing data along with research is made the default, if not mandatory. This way the incentives are aligned and there's time and money budget for this vital task. Some journals are leading the way here.

Everyone knows it, no matter how gifted you are chances of your discovering something important is same as any random guy discovering something equally important, i.e., mostly random.

You limit access to the data, you limit ability of others to make an important discovery. Status quo won't offer free access to this data because it apparently reduces their importance.

I think your comment betrays profound ignorance off what kind of data we are dealing with here, and how discovering things in this data looks like.

Opening the data (along with the tools made for it) up to other specialists is definitely the right thing to do.

And it worked: They had a nice new observable they defined and rather than having to go to LHC people to check the data, they could do it themselves.

Indeed. More and more discoveries these days come from cross-field interactions.

Things like a prof from one field walking past a blackboard with some formula or other for a different field and noticing that it is remarkably similar to something he knows intimately, or a solved problem in his field.

Similarly fresh eyes may notice or question something that trained eyes has overlooked virtually by habit.

That said, there is a risk that one get a "eternal september" scenario where any useful input is drowned in the flood of noise from a stampeding horde of newcomers.

Perhaps those who released the data can still claim some credit. "We analyzed the data using a cluster of intelligent learning agents, which revealed a number of interesting patterns."

Ywm. Y o