GAO Says Agencies Could Improve Data Sharing in Climate Research
October 22, 2007
WASHINGTON – The Government Accountability Office reports that federally funded climate researchers aren’t always required to follow the government’s own data-sharing policies, and the Republican lawmakers who sought the inquiry say that’s a mistake that needs correction.
“We want to know that critical data and methodology, paid for by taxpayers and used to formulate policy, cannot be hidden from the rest of the research community,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “Science works best when scientists are courageous and their work is transparent.”
Barton, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., ranking member of the committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, had requested the GAO study of four federal agencies last year after it was discovered that some climate researchers did not share their data with other scientists.
The four agencies – Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation – primarily rely on inter-agency or their own policies and practices to encourage researchers to make climate change data available, GAO reported.
However, GAO found that, while broad policies require data sharing and archiving, specific written guidelines varied among and within the agencies. For example, in its 12 climate-related programs, NOAA has only one program that has a written data-sharing policy and no agency-wide data-sharing policy.
The effectiveness of these policies is unclear.
“While the four agencies have taken steps to foster data sharing, they neither routinely monitor whether researchers make data available nor have fully overcome key obstacles and disincentives to data sharing,” GAO found. “Because agencies do not monitor data sharing, they lack evidence on the extent to which researchers are making data available to others.
“Key obstacles and disincentives could also limit the availability of data. For example, one obstacle is the lack of archives for storing certain kinds of climate change data, such as some ecological data, which places a greater burden on the individual researcher to preserve it,” GAO noted. “In addition, data preparation does not further a research career as does publishing results in journals…. Consequently, researchers are less likely to focus on preserving data for future use, thereby putting the data at risk of being unavailable to others.”
GAO had several recommendations for federal agencies, including to develop mechanisms to monitor archiving and to use the grant process to facilitate data sharing.
A copy of the GAO report can be found here.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Better late then never. Really, the pols should have this required of anybody seeking a grant.
Steve McIntyre is on the case already:
Dear Dr Bement,
I have read the recent GAO Report, which states:
The NSF agencywide policy states that researchers are “expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered.”
For several years, I have been attempting to obtain the “primary data” pertaining to Thompson’s ice cores from Dunde, Guliya and elsewhere. This data was used recently in An Inconvenient Truth. For each core, there are typically over 3000 samples, and each sample has a suite of measurements including isotopes and chemistry. Thompson has failed to archive this “primary data” and has failed to share it with other researchers. Instead of archiving this important data, Thompson has (and this only after complaint) archived only gross summaries of the oxygen isotope information and not always for the complete core. Grey versions of the data are often inconsistent.
If existing NSF policies are sufficient to require Thompson to archive or share this data, could you please take immediate steps to require him to do so. If NSF policies are inadequate to require him to do so, could you please immediately advise the GAO that your policies do not require Thompson to archive or share his data so that GAO does not mislead readers who might interpret the language in their report as implying that NSF policies are binding on researchers.
Regards,
Stephen McIntyre
Does McIntyre publicly archive all his work with FULL docuemntation if he wants to play “public scientist” ?
SM: “and I stated ahead of time that I would archive the results promptly whatever they showed and would archive them when they became available as opposed to when and if I published an academic article on them.”
So what’s the http or ftp address then. Let’s go and check.
Go right ahead then Luke. Let us know how you get on.
errr what’s the address again?
http://www.climateaudit.org/data/
http://www.climateaudit.org/data/colorado/2007_Almagre_Info.xls
Even Steve McIntyre can’t archive data before he actually has it!
Documentation is quite sparse. I wonder what curation and data quality procedures are implemented. hmmm . None …. yes…
But, but, Luke, archiving’s very expensive, not so easy to do, not really required by many institutions, or so you said when you were defending the lack of archiving by the Hockey Team et al.
Now McIntyre is updating the proxies that the Team said were too difficult to update, archiving the data, and you complain that’s not good enough.
What a pathetic little cheerleader you are.