Nasa just made all its research available online for free

After 9/11, when people were running around like decapitated chickens, a lot of useful government-funded (read: taxpayer-funded) documentation was pulled from sites like nist.gov. It has slowly been trickling back. This may be a similar case.

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.

>I'm actually curious what is new within this. As it stands, NASA research pre-prints are available on the tech reports server

One big difference is that most journal will not allow papers to cite a pre-print paper. A lot of the pre-prints will have different names and differ slightly in content.

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.

> Having all the world's knowledge available on your desktop just a click away is the beginning of another exponential leap forward.

Indeed. I had a fun example of that just last Friday. I volunteered for a new task on my job, rewriting someone's sloppy ad-hoc implementation of some diagram-drawing stuff in our application. I decided to practice the virtue of scolarship[0] and 5 minutes later, I had a printed copy of a paper from (who I assume are) leading experts on this particular topic, from which I've learned of approaches that were much better than ones I was thinking of.

Today we have an unprecedented opportunity - no matter where you live, no matter what question you have, as long as you know English, you have access not just to knowledge about it; you have access to the best knowledge humanity as a species currently has about it. You only have to use it. Want to learn about some topic? Don't pick up just any random tutorial, spend 10 minutes and get[1] the best book on the subject.

(Not to say that papers are perfect - I sometimes wish researchers would cut the bullshit out of publications, and focus more on presenting the methods instead of the results. I.e. it's fine and dandy that your algorithm is so good it can be used in realtime, but how about focusing more on explaining the details of the algorithm itself, so that I could actually use it?)

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/3m3/the_neglected_virtue_of_scholars...

[1] - buy if you can, copy if you must. Personally, I support IP on books only in so far it helps the authors get fairly compensated; all the publishing industry built around it is mostly a huge brake on that "another exponential leap forward" 'WalterBright mentioned.

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

The complication is that it isn't just the public who it is made available to, it's made available to the whole world. There isn't necessarily a problem with that but the reality is that sometimes there is.

Still a much better chance of information becoming available this way than if it were private research.

>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.

They still charge for court records and opinions. Remember how Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for trying to take them for free?

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/

I very much doubt it's as "secret" as you think. Have you actually tried to get access to this data?

Imagine the entire skeptical climate blogosphere focusing its energy into p-hacking the raw climate dataset and models to prove their point. From the scientists' perspective, they wouldn't have a lot to gain by enabling this.

What are you talking about? Most of this data is publicly available. You can download it and run your own analysis right now if you wish.

> 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.

Seen this video? BUZr0Wr0v-s