From Now On You'll Be Able To Access NASA Research For Free (vice.com) 64
An anonymous reader writes:Fancy some super nerdy bedtime reading? NASA has announced that it will now provide public access to all journal articles on research funded by the agency. Any scientists publishing NASA-funded work will be required to upload their papers to a free, online database called PubSpace within a year of publication. PubSpace is managed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) PubMed Central, which archives biomedical research. You can see NASA-funded studies here, with recent examples including a paper on cardiovascular disease in Apollo astronauts and one on Martian tsunamis caused by meteor impacts. NASA explains that the new web portal is a response to a 2013 government request for federally-funded research to be more accessible. There are a few obvious exceptions to what's included, such as and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls. NASA's openness follows a trend to make science results more accessible outside of published, often paywalled journals.
From Now On You'll Be Able To Access NSA Data .. (Score:2)
.. for a fee.
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Anything's for sale... at the right price!
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To the contrary, this is different.
Hacking into NSA: effort worth 12 million â,
Seeing the face of NSA when giving away their virtual counterparts of predator drones and hellfire missiles for an apple and a dime ..priceless
Sad thing, when you wait 3 yrs. before selling that, back then brand new smartphone .. it means it isn't new and it was used by you.
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Getting "original prints" of NASA moon landing photographs: Both arms and a leg
Finding the original film footage of the *actual* NASA moon landings with 12 minutes of previously unrelased footage from stage 15: Priceless
So They Aren't Charging Us For What (Score:2)
we already paid for. Gee, Thanks.
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A lot of their material has been online for years:
http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/sear... [nasa.gov]
Except (Score:3)
Except Bigelow papers and the like on aliens and what not.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bigelow ranch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bigelow and NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/a... [nasa.gov]
Other links:
http://www.educatinghumanity.c... [educatinghumanity.com]
http://beforeitsnews.com/paran... [beforeitsnews.com]
http://www.michaelleehill.net/... [michaelleehill.net]
The culture of modern science (Score:4, Insightful)
The greater access everyone has to primary source material the better. When most people are only learning about new discoveries from mass media that cites research papers, much is lost and bias is introduced. The results of research should not be a walled fortress for the elite in-crowd, but an open, accessible library of knowledge for all.
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When most people are only learning about new discoveries from mass media that cites research papers, much is lost and more bias is introduced
FIFY
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Good point. Depending on whether a precision tool was manufactured by a Democrat or a Republican will certainly alter the measurements produced.
When we finally allow only Right-wing conservatives to create scientific instrumentation, we will all see what a hoax man-caused global climate change really is!
But seriously... yeah, any human research endeavor (aka "pure science") will always have some level of bias because it is done by humans who by their very nature are biased creatures.
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The greater access everyone has to primary source material the better. When most people are only learning about new discoveries from mass media that cites research papers, much is lost and bias is introduced. The results of research should not be a walled fortress for the elite in-crowd, but an open, accessible library of knowledge for all.
How much you want to bet you aren't getting the raw data ?
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No doubt!
The raw data is probably as reliable as the moon cheese is tasty.
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How much you want to bet you aren't getting the raw data ?
Well, when I click on the link that is supposed to be a NASA-funded journal article about tsunamis on Mars, I get taken to a Motherboard story instead. Slashdot is still powned by vice, right, and the editors love clicks to get ad revenues.
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GOOD RAW data on Slashdot is as common as a glass of iced tea, complete with round ice cubes, on a mahogany table in the lowest depths of Hell during a heat wave.
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What does raw data mean oh so enlightened AC?
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Some "commoners" actually do care, even if they do not subscribe to scientific journals or earn money through research grants.
Keeping science to the "Professional scientists" is the very root of the problem. The very statement reeks of elitism. The scientific method and sharing of results is supposed to be a process, not a social class for the "enlightened ones".
How many discoveries were made by people not part of the "in crowd" The peer review system is good in theory, but with such a small subset of the p
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Lets show some sound economic common sense. They are not giving away stuff free, they are feeding knowledge back into the community in order to get ideas back, often for free. Knowledge only has value when it is kept alive, buried and forgotten it is worthless, out there and circulating means it is generating new ideas, that is quite simply the way it works and it is a very economically sound and logical idea for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to promote. Also they have recruitment issue
Similar to PubMed (Score:4, Informative)
PubMed is the open access research paper depository for all federally funded medical research. It's open and free too.
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No, it's PubSpace.
Just because the depository behind it is hosted on the same server doesn't mean it's not different.
One of our servers in our department hosts something like 14 databases, each of which has a few hundred tables of data. Permissions and access vary between all of them.
If you go in through the PubSpace portal, you see space-related research, but you probably won't see the other stuff. I frequently get notified of scientific articles on different accumulator lists, such as genetics, biofuel,
What about the data? (Score:1)
Will NASA make the data in those papers freely available in their entirety? That's just as important as the papers. I'd sure like to see the raw unadjusted climate data sets.
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Are you intending to run them on your home supercomputer? Will Jarvis to the corrections for you too?
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Are you intending to run them on your home supercomputer?
An original Pentium system should suffice with a small chance of 1+1 occasionally equaling 2.00000000001
Climate data has been available for a decade... (Score:2)
The code is available here. [nasa.gov] Papers here. [nasa.gov] NASA uses station data compiled by NOAA GHCN v3 [noaa.gov] (meteorological stations), ERSST v4 [noaa.gov] (ocean areas), and SCAR [scar.org] (Antarctic stations),
According to the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies "Anyone can download it, run it for themselves and get the answer before we update our website every month." [realclimate.org]
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Perhaps you meant to reply to the person above me?
I was just pointing out that many of the climate models run on supercomputers, so it isn't like the average person has that kind of computing power available.
Later on in this article's comment section, I did mention the difficulty in getting access to the data, but generally, that isn't NASA data, but the Earth station data, as it is copyrighted to prevent the public from using it.
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Subtle redaction (Score:1)
There are a few obvious exceptions to what's included, such as and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls.
Such as what and material that's related to national security or affected by export controls? One or more words seem to be missing there. :)
I understand, they can't tell us what it is that we can't see. Got it.
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It was redacted before the submission was made. :)
Probably private data, but I can only guess what the submitter meant to say there.
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NASA has been involved in lots of classified stuff, as I understand, over the years—their kind of rockets aren't all that different from missiles after all.
As far as export control goes, there is a lot of stuff on the export control lists; radation hardened computers, and most anything that can take stuff into space and/or back, among many many other things.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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6. "oh god christ theres a bee in the suit" and additional redacted commentary from launch events.
The bee in question must first approve the release of this information.
this is a good thing, but not enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually had the privilege of advising the govt to do this a few years ago, so it is nice that it is happening. But even then, NASA was progressive and required open access to data and more from their supported publications. This is a notch up.
The problem is that it needs to be mandated across all journals, and the journals then will face a major problem -- how will they survive when one no longer needs to buy journal subscriptions to fund the journals? Government support isn't a good answer for lots of reasons. But what answer IS a good answer?
I don't know, but they'd better find it soon, because the Internet has made old-style journals largely obsolete and the public will no longer tolerate not being able to read the research they, after all, ultimately paid for. It is my profound hope that the NSF and other major agencies follow suit immediately. We'll see if e.g. Physical Review can survive it and deal with what comes either way.
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But even then, NASA was progressive and required open access to data and more from their supported publications.
Except data related to climate research as no one should have access to that but climate scientists! /s
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This is not true. In fact, it is not true by law, and was not true by law then. You simply haven't tried. The DATA is readily available from NASA funded research (and often the papers are/were too). The real problem, as I said, is that the old way the journals ran from the invention of the proceedings of the royal society to the present has been dead for at least five years, but nobody knows how to keep the journals (a desirable thing, believe me) and their refereeing and editorial process alive without
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I don't know, but they'd better find it soon, because the Internet has made old-style journals largely obsolete
Journals are still relevant as repositories for material and easy browsing tools. I've found amazing things just because I decided to browse through a journal, that I'd never spend the time googling, if I even knew what the best search terms would be.
But OpenAccess is already found.
and the public will no longer tolerate not being able to read the research they, after all, ultimately paid for.
This truly is a 1%-er issue. The vast majority of the public has no interest in reading this material, and the vast majority of those wouldn't understand what they were reading even if they did. You are posting in a very select
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I disagree. There is a whole world of "public", and a lot of them don't have access to a University library. And no, science should not be confined to the cloistered halls of academe. You simply don't know who might come up with a new discovery or objection to a published work, or who might be inspired by one to invent something new. In addition to US citizens that paid for the research, there are young people in India, China, Africa who will only have the opportunity to read real scientific papers if t
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I disagree. There is a whole world of "public", and a lot of them don't have access to a University library.
Yes, there is a whole world of public, and just because they don't have access to a library (we are talking about journals, not libraries, btw) doesn't mean they have a burning desire to read scientific journal articles. "The pubic", for the most part, and in a vast majority, just don't care. Otherwise this problem would have been solved a long time ago.
And no, science should not be confined to the cloistered halls of academe.
Why do you think are you disagreeing with me?
Do we WANT to keep the rest of the world in a state of non-participatory ignorance?
Can you please disagree with something I actually said, not what you wanted me to say?
But still, paywalled journals are, IMO, doomed.
I assume you are not inte
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I remember the STAR journal from way back when. Monthly publication about 1 inch thick, listed science, technical, and research papers. A paragraph abstract for each paper, cost and where to order. I haven't seen what has become of it. There are sites like this http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] and this http://www.sti.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] though I haven't gone through them lately. It can be very tedious finding stuff. I remember few years ago when it was pulled offline ("OMG the Chinese are stealing ALL our secrets!") which
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The NIH has been requiring this for some time now, and the important part is that the papers are freely available after one year. So the journals get to reap the benefits that their selection process provides for a given period of time. Thus far, they've been able to handle survival under such circumstances and some (*cough* Elsevier *cough*) have even thrived.
And note that I slipped in an important observation that gets often overlooked: journals provide an important filtering mechanism that has, thus fa
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One other thing that journals do, when performing their filtering process is force the authors to re-write. When my papers get rejected, I don't turn around and just resubmit elsewhere, I take the criticism to heart and address it. My best written papers are ones that were rejected (or required major revisions) two or three times. My most highly referenced paper was rejected from three journals before being accepted (and then was covered in the international press). Each rewrite was painful, but it is a
#nationalsecurity (Score:1)
Read that as NSA and holly fuck (Score:3)
has American embraced freedom over night?
Delayed? (Score:4, Interesting)