Posted by Gary Poyner at 18:04 on 2011 Mar 04
If your undertaking research with your data (photometry for instance), with the end result being a paper for BAAJ, then you wouldn’t want your data to be freely avaialable until it was finished with and published. Of course! However if your taking pretty pictures to see how a particular variable nebula is behaving (images which are freely available from dozens of places on the web) then I see no problem with the BAA releasing some of these. Are all images obtained in the name of research with the aim for publication? I guess it’s what your intending on doing with it in the end that matters. However I’m hardly the person to argue this point, as I don’t see myself paying for any images in the future (either with the BAA or anyone else). I was simply interested to hear what the objections were.To give you an example of my own remote observing with the AAVSO. I use the 50cm telescope at Sonoita Research Observatory in Arizona for photometry of magnetic CV’s. This is part of a network of telescopes run by the AAVSO called AAVSOnet. Everyone’s images are placed in a folder for retrieval once they have been completed (can be 10mb each with in my case 100+ images available each night). This folder is public! No passwords are required. Even non-members can get in and retrieve any image and analyse the data within it. Other than membership fees there is no cost involved, as this facility is open to any member who can put in a convincing research proposal.Gary