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Isn't it the same in many cases? E.g. the discovery of the higgs boson is only possible with access to a large particle accelerator, many astronomy studies are only reproducible with access to a large telescope, and some ml studies are only reproducible with access to a large dataset. Sure it's not ideal, but it's better than not publishing the results at all.

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Yes, but that data is made publicly available in physics. It’s not kept as a secret so some company can make millions of dollars selling it.

I think the fact that there are two things called 'data' here obscures the better analogy. The physics data is made available publicly, but you can't reproduce the method of generating it without building a particle accelerator. Similarly, trained models are often made public, but the dataset used to generate it isn't. So perhaps the data in physics is more analogous to the trained model.

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