Thanks for your comment.

My point about making ‘raw data’ available is not that the CRU or any equivalent academics should be responsible for doing any re-formatting (that’s exactly why we need a *standard* way, so that they can focus on science), but that now in the age of the internet we can begin to share data more easily and allow it to be accessed publicly as a matter of default. Taking inspiration from sites such as the Guardian data store – http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store – this would hopefully make conclusions easier to interrogate, and more to the point stop giving people like Lawson fuel for their witch-burning fires.

Re. program code, have you come across Github – http://github.com ? It’s basically a version control system for that works in a similar way to other software such as Subversion but makes it very easy to make a codebase ‘open’ online. Given that there is very little to hide once a paper has been published, it seems that we could better encourage scientific collaboration in this way (the codebase should only be opened once conclusions have been drawn).

The idea being that once you have open data + open code, we can reinstall some rational debate about science rather than the shrill squawking about whether or not datasets or code are open. I thought it was apt that Dr Benny Peiser had to sheepishly admit that he is not a climate scientist – perhaps following some of the above suggestions would more acutely highlight his lack of expertise.

There may indeed be risks in this approach if raw data is further construed to misrepresent warming trends, but I agree with the statement in the hearing that science must be as open as possible, and using the internet to its full potential seems to be a good way to do this. I also have faith in most humans to generally make their mind up independently when all the facts are in front of them, and I think that something must be done to halt the worrying drop in public belief in climate change.

To reiterate, I think that opening up historical data is not something that the academics themselves should have responsibility for, otherwise we’ll get more frustration and productivity bottlenecks such as the ones catalysed by the FOI requests at CRU. But going forward we can instil a culture of openness more proactively by using web-based dissemination techniques.

Jamie

Some interesting thoughts here.

I’m not so sure of the value of making all the data publicly available as a matter of course – in the past I’ve spent days if not weeks re-formating data files so that they can be uploaded to national data archives. In the CRU case, very few people would be that interested in the raw data – the whole rationale behind CRU’s work on surface temperature time series is to produce a usable product that has been properly quality controlled. The only reason that certain people are desperate to get CRU’s data is because they’ve been told they can’t have it (from CRU, who don’t “own” it). In most cases, I’m sure if you went to the data owner with a legitimate scientific purpose, then they would give you the data – this is exactly what CRU did.

As for code, I suppose if it had to be made public I’d probably programme a bit more elegantly but, like Jones, no reviewer (or even paper co-author!) has ever asked to see my code. Maybe it should be submitted with papers as supplementary material but I doubt anyone would be particuarly interested in it – at least in that case it would be there if there were ever disputes over papers. I’m not sure how impressed publishers would be at having to archive GBs of code though!

I assume you saw my review of the evidence session, I don’t think Phil Jones did a good job describing how the scientific process works but I also don’t think that reproducability should mean that you have to give anyone everything you’ve ever worked on. There are issues here but I hope that knee-jerk solutions aren’t imposed because of this case.

Andy