A #ProprietaryPeriod for #JWST is essential if people with limited research time are to be able to use the telescope. The only people who would benefit from the removal of proprietary periods are astronomers at well-resourced institutions (i.e. large private universities) who have lots of research time. Those who would lose out include astronomers at public and teaching-focused universities – such as almost all minority serving institution.
#Astronomy #Astrodon #RenameJWST
The point of a #ProprietaryPeriod is to give people time to analyse their data – which they have written a proposal to get – and publish it. It means that people who have other duties, such as a heavy teaching load, have a head start when they can't be scooped by astronomers with more time and/or experience. It gives time to recruit postdocs and for students to get up to speed. It levels the playing field a bit to help people at smaller institutions.
#Astronomy #Astrodon #JWST #RenameJWST
@Robminchin Not to say I disagree with your premise, but I suspect that more minds on a set of data allow for better and faster science to happen. Do you think this problem could be improved via more effective planning and leveraging better software tools?
E.g. "reproducible research" tools like org-mode, RMarkdown, etc, should (I think) allow the prepared researcher to pre-design analyses and visualizations based on theory, while the data collection job is still in the queue. After a cursory comparison, unexpected results can be moved to the forefront, and remaining analyses can migrate to the supplemental information, all without the need to manually investigate the data almost at all. It's based on first principles, efficient, and doesn't bog other interested parties down as much.
Of course this doesn't eliminate the embargo, but I hope we can try to shorten them to improve data accessibility, while continuing to level the playing field for new or overloaded/understaffed researchers.
Ah, I can see how that may pose an issue for what I initially proposed, but are there typical ways to test for such deviations that are common to astronomy, similar to a shotgun assay that run loads of tests at once?
Clearly I'm not sure what form of data is typical to your field, but I do know this: never underestimate a smart, lazy person's ability to automate away annoyances with computers 😂
(As an example, I'm working on a short Emacs extension to take my detailed manuscript outlines and extract just the 1st, 2nd, and last headers so I can do structural editing in context, but "tangle" the output to a finalized version that can compile to latex and pdf. It makes writing and organizing my thoughts WAY easier. Oh, and if it wasn't obvious, I really love org-mode, and heavily recommend trying it with doom-emacs if you like vim keybindings 😉)
@johnabs As you say, if there's a way to automate it people will! This has been done in a lot of transient search projects, such as FRBs with CHIME (in the radio) and the Zwicky Transient Factory in the optical. But for many observations this isn't possible.
@johnabs In general, the question with astronomical data is not whether it agrees with the model but whether the ways in which it disagrees with the model are interesting. Observations that actually agree with prior models are rare enough that it's considered surprising when that happens.