[Roger Hunter]

(11-03-2017, 02:28 AM)Skywise Wrote:

(11-02-2017, 02:19 PM)Roger Hunter Wrote:

(11-02-2017, 05:00 AM)Skywise Wrote: It's too bad that the article is behind a paywall.

Yes, this paywall business hampers things for individuals who have no ready access to university or government libraries. That's my only regret about retiring.

Roger

Something I've been seeing a lot of in the astronomy and related sciences is at least the data is open access to everyone. Maybe the research papers are still a bit locked up, but anyone can access the data. For example, all the imagery from our space probes are freely available. A specific example is Kepler, which was designed to detect planets around other stars. And there's a lot of citizen science projects related to astronomy. Quote-unquote "ordinary people" are beginning to make real "big" contributions to the science. I mean big like more than just discovering a comet. If I had the time, I could access the raw data and start looking for exoplanets and I would get at least partial credit for discovering them. There's also the Galaxy Zoo project where a new type of astronomical object was discovered several years ago, with the prototype being named after the one who inquired about the strange green galaxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny's_Voorwerp).

But then, astronomy has always been much more accessible to the public than other sciences.


How easy would it be for me to analyze seismological data, much less get a hold of something like seismic reflection data, and get a discovery published?

Brian

Brian;

Not hard at all. It's essentially public property since it was obtained with tax money. At one time someone was downloading the quake catalogue and selling copies. Our branch chief was ticked off about it but there was nothing he could do about it.

Getting it published would be the problem. Journals can be fussy about credentials. 
I did manage to get one published but being a USGS employee accounted for that.

Roger