
Nasa just made all its research available online for free - signa11
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-research-available-free-online-a7200011.html
======
thearn4
I'm actually curious what is new within this. As it stands, NASA research pre-
prints are available on the tech reports server
([http://www.sti.nasa.gov/](http://www.sti.nasa.gov/)), typically right after
the export control review process.

edit: maybe it's related to certain journals where there wasn't access on the
STI server? Seems odd to me. For the 8 years that I've been at NASA, it's
always been expected that my group's work had to be accessible.

edit2: not all rules are universal across the agency, so my experience may be
too specific to Glenn Research Center/my division. In any case, the more open,
the better.

~~~
exDM69
NASA yanked a lot of material away from their NTRS (NASA technical reports
server) some years ago. A lot of research papers that I would have needed in
my research were gone. I can find some of that stuff via Sci-Hub but not
everything.

At one point I was looking for a retracted paper and I even contacted my local
(non-US) representative (the contact that was listed in NTRS) to try to get
that paper, but they didn't even try to help me.

A lot of the retracted papers were fundamental research dating back to the
space race era.

Glad to see more research being published but really, a lot of it was
previously available but got yanked due to politics.

~~~
thearn4
Interesting, I was not aware that they had done this!

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WalterBright
> Nasa announced it is making all its publicly funded research available
> online for free

This is the way things ought to be for all publicly funded research, not just
NASA. Thank you, NASA, for leading the way.

The beginning of technological progress for mankind started with writing, the
beginning of the industrial revolution started with the printing press. Having
all the world's knowledge available on your desktop just a click away is the
beginning of another exponential leap forward.

~~~
themartorana
I was born in the 70s, so I still remember middle school research papers that
required no less than 4 sources sited, only one of which could be an
encyclopedia. In any case, it still gives me pause to consider that I have a
box with almost instantaneous access to the wealth of the world's information
in my pocket.

~~~
todd8
I was born a few years after WWII. I used to have a library occupying many
shelves of about 10 years of CACM, JACM, SigPLAN, and other CS journals, along
with file cabinets full of copies of research papers from other journals (like
_Software Practice & Experience_ and _ACTA Informatics_ ). There simply was no
other way to look things up: curious about Alpha-Beta pruning? You had to find
Knuth's 1975 article on it, published in _Artificial Intelligence_.

Things are so different and so much better now. However, I do find that the
way I can so quickly browse so many publications, blogs, wikipedia, and source
on the internet means that I don't retain the information I do process as well
as I did when I had to find a research paper in a university research library,
read it, and take notes. In the pre-www days I had an almost photographic
ability to remember the research papers I read; now, not so much. (Maybe it's
age, my wife has to help me find my car keys!)

~~~
pelario
_> However, I do find that the way I can so quickly browse so many
publications, blogs, wikipedia, and source on the internet means that I don't
retain the information I do process as well as I did when I had to find a
research paper in a university research library, read it, and take notes._

Being in my 30's I agree with the sentiment; I think it is the price to be
able to explore more, and more quickly. I think that the case now is that if
you want to retain something, then it is a different process than the
exploration stage, while before the current state of affairs both processes
were less decoupled.

------
codyb
Link to the actual data [0].

Looks pretty neat actually. This seems to stem from an executive order by
President Obama in 2013. Mobile browsing is okay but I'm excited to check out
some of the APIs when I get back to my computer a bit later on. They're
seperated by category (Earth Science, Aerospace, etc).

Seems like a lot of the data is already queryable by their api's and I assume
there are data dumps and research papers available as well.

Very cool. There is a serious wealth of data and apis available for tinkerers
and builders these days from watson to NYC data to Nasa!

[0] -
[http://www.nasa.gov/open/researchaccess/pubspace](http://www.nasa.gov/open/researchaccess/pubspace)

~~~
dogma1138
The executive order it self is part of the data released on their dataportal
:) [https://data.nasa.gov/external-dataset?datasetId=5abq-
kcha](https://data.nasa.gov/external-dataset?datasetId=5abq-kcha)

------
dmix
The mars tsunami link is a fun read:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4872529/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4872529/)

> We conclude that, on early Mars, tsunamis played a major role in generating
> and resurfacing coastal terrains.

That's a fascinating thing to to think about. Reminds me of the the ocean
planet they landed on in Interstellar. Although Mars had giant tsunamis caused
by impacts instead of perpetual waves caused by the gravity of a black hole.

------
iamleppert
Great that they're finally getting around to doing this 3 years after the
order was signed.

Shouldn't it be a law that any research done with public dollars should be
made available to the public for free? Any costs associated with the
publishing should be built into the funding.

~~~
igf
>Shouldn't it be a law that any research done with public dollars should be
made available to the public for free? Any costs associated with the
publishing should be built into the funding.

If you like. How much do you think that would cost, though? Typically journals
charge about $2000 to make a paper open-access.

Now, given that extra research funding won't just magically appear, what we're
basically saying is that less research should be funded, _just_ so that it can
be hypothetically read by the small minority of people who wish to read it and
yet aren't connected to a research institution and can't be bothered going to
their local university library to arrange access.

"Ah", you say, "but at least the university libraries would save money because
they'd no longer have to pay for all those journal subscriptions". Well,
except they would, because of the rest of the world, and also because of all
the locally-funded research which was published before this hypothetical new
law came into effect.

It doesn't necessarily follow that just because research is publically funded
that it should be publically available. Many things that are publically funded
are not publically available, which is why I can't take a ride in an Air Force
plane whenever I feel like it. Publically funded things are funded for
specific purposes, which may or may not be served by making it publically
available.

~~~
iamleppert
Do you really think it costs $2000 to publish a PDF on the Internet these
days?

I'm talking about putting the documents on S3 with a simple paginated frontend
that would allow searching the name/synopsis.

You must work for the government?

~~~
detaro
igf isn't saying that the technical cost of publishing the PDF is $2000. They
are saying that it is what journals charge for the right to do so while also
publishing in them. And yes, many academics will rather use any funds they can
to pay that than not publish in those journals, so unless there is some
widely-coordinated move to force the issue funds will go there for now.

While grants can enforce open-access publications, forbidding publication in
other venues seems a lot more contentious.

~~~
iamleppert
I guess I just don't understand this kind of attitude. If it was done with
public funds, it should be made available to the public. We have the means and
capability to do so now.

The point of research is to be useful, even if it doesn't immediately have an
application in the present, it could form the basis of something new in the
future. Not having easy access to this institutional knowledge decreases the
value to the public, or putting it behind a paywall and restricting access
could prevent a non-standard performer or individual contributor from
obtaining access and thereby benefiting.

I think the motivations in the academic world is very flawed. If I were an
academic my goal would be to provide my work to the largest audience I
possibly could, so there likelihood of someone benefiting from it would be the
highest. This is especially true for research that has no present application.
It should be highly accessible and available to anyone if the public has paid
for the academic to live, eat, and generally do the work.

------
owenversteeg
Ok, so maybe I'm missing something, but what's new here? Is it just the
portal?

I've been reading NASA technical papers and publications for years, and
although most of the research I was reading was very focused in a specific
field, everything I wanted to see was freely available. Even some of the
publications linked in the article have been online for a decent amount of
time.

~~~
_delirium
I've read NASA tech reports for years too; seems like one of those things
that's "always" been online, though I don't know when precisely it went
online. It's been online long enough, at least, to have even accumulated some
episodes of backlash. In 2013, it was forced offline for a few months, because
Congresspeople claimed that it might include content The Chinese could use to
reconstruct national-security-sensitive information, so demanded that reports
undergo a security audit:
[http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/](http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/)

------
joeyrideout
Searching the web portal leads to a PMC database query with the filter "nasa
funded". Here's a link to a query with just that filter, which returns all 863
articles:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22nasa+funded%22%5BFi...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22nasa+funded%22%5BFilter%5D)

------
nxzero
Saying that "all" of NASA's research is being made available is a stretch
given it's known they work on a lot of classified projects with the military,
intelligence, etc.:

[http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/)

------
paul_f
This article is so misleading. NASA is requiring that the pubished research
papers be public. The research discoveries are still owned by the Universities
that did the research - the Bayh Dole Act is still in effect.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act)

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thefifthsetpin
Title should read "some" rather than "all"

------
todd8
Not NASA, but related: I really want the raw climate data and atmospheric
models to be made open and publicly available. I don't understand how
researchers can claim that climate change is the most serious problem facing
our species while at the same time hiding what they are doing. I know that
some data is available, but considering that our government funds most of the
research why haven't they put this stuff up on github?

Is the secrecy really necessary in order to get tenure and win grants?

~~~
hackuser
> hiding what they are doing

Would you back up this claim? There is too much rumor and propaganda around
about climate science, so I feel we should take extra care to substantiate any
claims.

I generally like the idea of scientific data being public, but the theory that
there is a conspiracy of climate scientists (of which the claim that data is
being 'hidden' is a building block) is tiresome and distracting from the very
real, critical problems.

~~~
todd8
From the IPCC's _Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution
of Working Group I to the Fifth Assess- ment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change_ , Chapter 9 Evaluation of Climate Models, pp.
749-750.

> With very few exceptions (Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013)
> modelling centres do not routinely describe in detail how they tune their
> models. Therefore the complete list of observational constraints toward
> which a particular model is tuned is generally not available.

From the House of Commons Science and Technology report _The disclosure of
climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia_
paragraph 54:

> 54\. It is not standard practice in climate science and many other fields to
> publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. We think that
> this is problematic because climate science is a matter of global importance
> and of public interest, and therefore the quality and transparency of the
> science should be irreproachable. We therefore consider that climate
> scientists should take steps to make available all the data used to generate
> their published work, including raw data; and it should also be made clear
> and referenced where data has been used but, because of commercial or
> national security reasons is not available. Scientists are also, under
> Freedom of Information laws and under the rules of normal scientific
> conduct, entitled to withhold data which is due to be published under the
> peer-review process.78 In addition, scientists should take steps to make
> available in full their methodological workings, including the computer
> codes. Data and methodological workings should be provided via the internet.
> There should be enough information published to allow verification.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for doing the legwork to find and provide that; while the first cite is
a narrow case, the second looks great.

> It is not standard practice in climate science and many other fields ...

I think this statement supports the idea that the actions of climate
scientists are not a conspiracy, but normal practice in scientific research.
I've read similar things in many other contexts.

On principle, I think all scientific data (and papers) should be open and
free. In practice, I would need to know far more about the costs, value, and
implications before demanding it.

On a practical level, very, very few would have the knowledge, skill,
resources (software, etc.), time, and motivation to make use of the data. Very
few outside any particular field even read that field's papers, much less try
to work with the data. Likely, anyone in the general public trying to do so
would interfere with the 'signal' of discourse by creating only noise - the
open data could hurt more than help. If it costs a lot to produce the data,
it's very possible that most of that expense would be a waste. OTOH, sometimes
that noise and cost is the price of democracy.

~~~
todd8
Yes, and to be realistic, the researchers themselves are in a very competitive
environment. Having done many years of graduate work, I realize just how hard
it is for doctoral and post-doc students to break into a good position at a
research university, but that's just the beginning. There is serious
competition after that for tenure and grants.

Who want's to spend time dealing with FOIA (freedom of information act)
requests from kooky skeptics while worrying that some other researcher will
scoop your research? There are structural impediments in our university
research environments to completely open science.

However, I'm hopeful because of the success that the software community has
had with open software. Before Richard Stallman started the Free Software
Foundation I would never have believed that such a transformation of the
industry was possible.

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girishso
At last... I remember Richard Feynman complaining exactly about this!

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halis
Great! I glanced over it and I think the next step is to have them provide a
For Dumbasses version of pretty much all of it...

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eecks
Has anyone looked at the resource? Are there data sets and other similar
things that could be used in novel ways?

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Azuolas
following Space X as a top competitor

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monksy
Including about set design of the moon for the landing?

(For those who just threw a fit.. it's a joke)

~~~
aurora72
Seen this video? BUZr0Wr0v-s

