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Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by ip26 on Monday January 12, 2026 @06:53PM (#46595750)
Seems to me there are potentially opportunities for greater returns to data gathering work as quality data can inform many more papers in the future. How that will work still needs to be brokered…
Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by tony_cannistra on Monday January 12, 2026 @06:58PM (#46595776)
Absolutely. There are a few excellent projects in this vein, as well - where deeper investment in data gathering, done in ways to optimize its broad use in research, is occurring.

An example is the National Science Foundation NEON project, which is a long-term ecological monitoring initiative with common field methodologies across 81 North American sites. https://www.neonscience.org/

Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by jofer on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:46PM (#46596058)
Huh. I weirdly enough have worked with a lot of those sites from the remote sensing side, but never really know what the overall project was. Just "use the NEON sites for examples". I should have looked it up more at the time. Thanks for sharing!
Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by nick49488171 on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:15PM (#46595876)
It leads to hoarding data (or artifacts) within labs for exclusive analysis.
Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by marcus_holmes on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:59PM (#46596164)
This. It's this broken publishing model we have at the moment that is the real problem.

You should be able to publish data as a paper and get academic credit for doing that. Then others can publish analyses of that data, crediting you.

Re:'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the... by tony_cannistra on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @01:12PM (#46605152)
To an extent there are incentive structures that support what you're describing, but the reality is that they just don't hold the same amount of value as "results-based" publishing does.