It was revealed last week that East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit discarded much of the original climate data used by by their researchers to conclude that the earth has experienced acceleating warming. While this is not the only set of data used by climate researchers and the consensus view on climate change is unlikely to change because of this news, the “case of the missing climate data” should serve as a wake up call to policy makers, scientists, journalists, and citizens that raw data should be (and can be) shared with the wider world, especially in situations with stakes as high as the climate change debate.
There has been some recent movement in this direction with FRPAA, the Federal Research Public Access Act, sponsored by Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Lieberman (I-CT). From the press release,
Their legislation … would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.
This bill would be even more demanding than the NIH’s data data sharing requirements and allow the actual funders of the research (taxpayers) to access the resulting papers.
Universities, research centers, and individual scientists should also push for data sharing and transparency in their respective fields. Individual policies should be allowed to vary, but if scholars are truly interested in contributing to the scientific enterprise, as opposed to hoarding data in the fear of being scooped or critically reviewed by a competitor, they should welcome greater data transparency. This might mean a change in the way scholars gather data, publish research, and secure employment, but the alternative is what happened at CRU.
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