NASA is reportedly moving towards ending all proprietary periods for NASA missions, including GO programs. This would mean that a researcher who wins JWST time in future cycles will not have any exclusive access to the data—it will be available to the world the moment it lands.

I wrote an Op-Ed for SciAm on the topic, which summarizes my position. You can read it here.  I summarize it below, but one thing I noticed is a huge split in reactions to my Op-Ed between near-unanimity by astronomers that proprietary periods are important, and non-scientists who don’t understand why public access and moving science as fast as possible isn’t more important than the needs of astronomers. This seems especially clear on Reddit.

Click for my SciAm Op-Ed

I’ve learned that the public doesn’t appreciate that a scientist who spends years developing an idea reasonably expects to get credit for it by publishing the final result. They see that as somehow selfish and bad for science. I need to keep this in mind when I bring it up in the future.

Anyway here’s the argument:

The push for ending JWST proprietary time is supposedly coming from the White House, which is promoting open access to research output and data upon publication. That’s great!

Zero EAP certainly has a significant role to play in astronomy, especially for survey data and programs that were designed with broad community input. Data generated *by* the community should be data available *to* the community. TESS and Kepler showed how powerful this can be.

But zero EAP is badly inappropriate for GO programs conceived and designed by small groups. Data generated *by* a small group should be available *to* that small group, so they can get full credit for their work. This is standard across science.

A citation to a proposal number in the acknowledgements of a scooping paper is not meaningful credit that a proposer can use in their career. I explore this more here.

Also, if GO programs have zero proprietary period there will be strong social pressures not to use those data for a while, especially if the PI is a student. But many astronomers will ignore these pressures, and others might not appreciate students are PI of a program.

This will lead to unnecessary and difficult ethical challenges in the community. Zero EAP means we have to navigate these things through fuzzy and evolving community norms with little guidance. EAPs keep the rules clear and benefit everyone, keeping honest people honest.

NASA seems to be arguing fully open data is an equity issue, but zero EAP benefits well-resourced astronomers most. They are the ones who can afford to hire teams to hoover up archival data and quickly turn it around, scooping the PIs of the data. EAPs keep astronomy fair.

Zero EAP will be bad for the profession because it will encourage poor work-life balance as astronomers go into “crunch time” mode as soon as data land to avoid being scooped (or to scoop others). EAPs allow astronomers to work at an appropriate pace.

Zero EAPs will lead to sloppy results, as astronomers prize being first over being right. Good science takes time, and scientists should be *encouraged* to get it right, not balancing care against the risk of losing the whole project. EAPs keep astronomy rigorous.

Zero EAP is inconsistent with open access standards, which require data to be public upon publication. Forcing small team’s data to be public before analysis would make NASA and astronomy outliers among sciences.

Zero EAP is equivalent to requiring chemists to post their lab notebooks and raw data online as they do their experiments as a condition of winning grant money. It does not pass the smell test.

NASA has intimated that if zero EAP hurts under-resourced scientists, then the solution is to give them more resources. First of all: if NASA’s really going to address structural inequities across science, GREAT! But, can we do that first please?

Also: The relevant resource is time, and money is an imperfect substitute for this. Many researchers are not at institutions where they can “buy themselves out” or realistically hire a postdoc. It also doesn’t help students. EAPs are a narrowly tailored solution to the problem.

I encourage my colleagues to fill out the STScI poll with their opinion, and to share the poll widely in the field.  The survey closes Feb 15, 2023.