Posted by Andrea Tasselli at 16:33 on 2011 Mar 04
Ahem…Being the "owner" (for lack of better words) of one of the ongoing observational projects (that is the first one) listed there I feel I should spend few words on the subject. The normal approach in astronomical research (as well as in many others scientific endeavours) is to reserve the right of access of the acquired data to the principal investigator and/or team until proper paper(s) is/are published, this for obvious reasons which have to do with priority of discovery as well as other various, often financial, reasons. In the specific case of these baa-founded project the actual "owner" actually has ownership for slightly more than 50% (since he/she funded both the remaining 50% and his/her share as baa member). Therefore I do see an issue in terms of ownerships of the rights of the data until a paper is produced or the data itself is released to the public by the "owner". In addition to that in due course the "owner" may well have increased the personal contribution to the project so that the actual personal pecuniary share is (far) larger than the original 50% plus (as it is in my case).In the hypotetical case of (me) releasing all the raw images what would be preventing anyone else to do the data analysis and publish the results him/herself? On top of this there is the sheer weight of the data, which can be in the order of 100s of MB. Is there enough capacity in the baa server to handle potential GBs of data?This said, if the council decide that the data should be released to other baa members at large I’ll obligingly comply. At present however I’ll only release jpg images to the interested parties, if available.Andrea T.