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Comment by dalek2point3 | Hacker News Reader

Any hints for non-physicists as to what this enables? Presumably you could have asked for the data anyway, no? Why is this a big deal?

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There is a good case for delaying the release of the data to give the associated researchers a chance to write their papers, theses, etc. A lot of groundwork has to be laid to get one of these experiments constructed, and it wouldn't be right for the ones who did that work to be jumped by an outside group, who might then receive credit for a discovery. After some time though, the data definitely needs to be opened up. It belongs to everyone, and there is no good in keeping it behind a wall forever.

In the genomics world, data from large projects is released as soon as a distribution system can be built, and the distribution system is also needed internally for the consortium so this is usually a very early stage.

Non-consortium members who download data are asked to agree that they will not publish a paper on the data before the data producers have had a shot to find things. And if somebody were to go against this understanding, usually journal editors would wait to publish the paper until after the consortium publishes its paper.

However in The Cancer Genome Atlas, an even more open approach was taken; there's just an end date to the embargo on the data, and if data producers and researchers don't get their act together in time, the data is free for everyone to publish on.

From what I understand, the data is owned by CERN and not open to the public.

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